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Unread 02-01-2018, 11:12 PM
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AZ Foreman AZ Foreman is offline
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I don't usually bother myself one way or another with Burton. He's not very useful, I think. Not in the way that e.g. Lyall or Rueckert are.

But I'll say this.

Criticism of Orientalists is greatly overblown, and I have spent a decade being irritated by the kneejerk flagellation they receive. I don't have a problem with the non-literal, or the interpretative. I find the "Politics of Representation" to be tiresome and overrated. In short, I think you're reading into my response a load of pretty heavy baggage, but it is a cargo I have never taken on board and vehemently refuse to transport.

My problem with Burton is his combination of ineptness and disingenuousness. Burton acquired a reputation as a brilliant linguist that appears to have been a little bit inflated. His translations are error-strewn, and when he didn't understand, (and when his friend and collaborator Yacoub Artin Pasha could offer no help) he often seems to have fudged things. Which itself still wouldn't bother me if he'd just owned up to it.

"But I really don't understand the criticism of improper additions. Why is a line drawn between Burton and all those anonymous people who also added their own stories to this concept we call The Thousand and One Nights?"


Probably because Burton himself drew such a line in the way he operated. There is a world of difference between print and manuscript culture, and between print and the semi-oral popular milieu in which the Nights coagulated before being sanitized into good literary Arabic in the redactions.

But I think you misunderstand. I don't really think the job of the translator is necessarily to be a glorified fax-machine. I am without opinion as to whether the taking of liberties, or making of additions, is a bad thing or not, because it really depends on the circumstance. I don't really have much of a problem with, say, Galland fudging an entire story (that of Aladdin) and adding it to the Nights. So successful was Galland that Aladdin is now part of the Nights in every sense that matters. What I have a problem with is the pretending that this is not what he was doing.

Additions and transformations are all well and good as far as it goes. But false advertising is still false advertising. One should be honest about what one is doing. At least in a context where readers are expecting your work to be something other than what you actually did. If you don't do that, then I basically don't trust you. So I see every reason in the world to, for example, tell someone on this board who doesn't know any Arabic that Burton should not be trusted.

If the aim was to add yet another layer of the spiral, the work would have been presented very differently.

"his version is the best and in certain ways the most accurate to the spirit of the thing."

I don't think the Nights have much of a "spirit" per se. I also don't think Burton has very much to recommend him as a story-teller, or editor.

"though no such correct version exists"

This by itself means nothing, or at least it means nothing when it comes to my assessment of Burton. I mean, the point that "no such correct version exists" is also true of much of a good deal of scripture, or of Gilgamesh, or the poetry of Hafiz. I could go on. Anyway, I do think one ought to be honest about the relationship one is engaging in with the texts at hand. There is something horribly deceptive about Borgesian games when nobody knows they're being played.

Last edited by AZ Foreman; 02-01-2018 at 11:14 PM.
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