[Orwn Acra]

Originally Posted by AZ Foreman

Honestly though I would not trust Richard Burton in, well, anything when it comes to his translation of the Thousand And One Nights. Or anything else for that matter. His version is full of bizarre speculations in the footnotes, inexplicable additions, questionable excisions.

His essay on the sotadic zone is ridiculous, his footnotes spurious and sexualized, his translation not literal--yet his version is the best and in certain ways the most accurate to the spirit of the thing. He understood, in a way that critics of the Orientalists never understood, that the Nights have no center, no definitive edition, no single origin; that to say there are incorrect additions or subtractions is to presume a "correct" version of the Nights, though no such correct version exists, and to engage in the very act of essentializing for which the Orientalists are criticized. It seems far healthier to take a step back and see Burton et al. as providing one more layer to this messy, amorphous story that spans generations and cultures in the same way that Scheherazade adds layer upon layer to her story, embedding one within another.

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?