What do you think?
Rate this book
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights Vol V & VI
The Arabian Nights is a collection of West and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, South Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.
What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used to express heightened emotion, and for songs and riddles.
What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used to express heightened emotion, and for songs and riddles.
- GenresClassics
Hardcover
First published February 26, 2015
17 people are currently reading
175 people want to read
About the author
Richard Francis Burton
1,606 books245 followersCaptain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS was a British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia, Africa and the Americas as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages.
Burton's best-known achievements include travelling in disguise to Mecca, an unexpurgated translation of One Thousand and One Nights (also commonly called The Arabian Nights in English after Andrew Lang's adaptation), bringing the Kama Sutra to publication in English, and journeying with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans led by Africa's greatest explorer guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, utilizing route information by Indian and Omani merchants who traded in the region, to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Burton extensively criticized colonial policies (to the detriment of his career) in his works and letters. He was a prolific and erudite author and wrote numerous books and scholarly articles about subjects including human behaviour, travel, falconry, fencing, sexual practices, and ethnography. A unique feature of his books is the copious footnotes and appendices containing remarkable observations and unexpurgated information.
He was a captain in the army of the East India Company serving in India (and later, briefly, in the Crimean War). Following this he was engaged by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa and led an expedition guided by the locals and was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. In later life he served as British consul in Fernando Po, Santos, Damascus and, finally, Trieste. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was awarded a knighthood (KCMG) in 1886.
Burton's best-known achievements include travelling in disguise to Mecca, an unexpurgated translation of One Thousand and One Nights (also commonly called The Arabian Nights in English after Andrew Lang's adaptation), bringing the Kama Sutra to publication in English, and journeying with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans led by Africa's greatest explorer guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, utilizing route information by Indian and Omani merchants who traded in the region, to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Burton extensively criticized colonial policies (to the detriment of his career) in his works and letters. He was a prolific and erudite author and wrote numerous books and scholarly articles about subjects including human behaviour, travel, falconry, fencing, sexual practices, and ethnography. A unique feature of his books is the copious footnotes and appendices containing remarkable observations and unexpurgated information.
He was a captain in the army of the East India Company serving in India (and later, briefly, in the Crimean War). Following this he was engaged by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa and led an expedition guided by the locals and was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. In later life he served as British consul in Fernando Po, Santos, Damascus and, finally, Trieste. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was awarded a knighthood (KCMG) in 1886.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 6, 2024
A classic of world literature for "Garbaugust"?! Prepare yourself! If you only know these stories from Disney cartoons or Ray Harryhausen movies, this famous omnibus of Middle-Eastern folklore may not be what you expect.
There are many alternate titles for the countless versions of this ever-evolving work. Most commonly, it is known as "The Thousand and One Nights," because the framing device for the collection is that Scheherazade, the new wife of a misogynist king who kills his brides immediately after taking their virginity, delays her execution by entrancing him each of 1000 nights with a story. That's some serious pillow talk! And already you can see where I'm going with this review.
The most famous version is from Richard Francis Burton, who was an adventurer, and his travels brought him some notoriety, such as his two-year expedition to find the source of the Nile. Ever seen a picture of this dude? That's one tough-looking SOB! But he also used his experiences to be an accomplished writer. It became his passion project to make as complete a translation of these Islamic fairy tales for English-speakers as possible. An ambitious undertaking to say the least, because over the centuries, the amount of stories considered "canon" kept growing, so that Burton's original book, "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night," weighed in at 10 volumes. On top of that, he published a further 7 volumes that he called "The Supplemental Nights". Geez!
So before you ask--no, I have not read all 17 volumes of stories. Though I have dipped in to a variety of translations and read numerous excerpts from different collections, the version I read cover-to-cover was an abridged edition, which was printed as a Barnes and Noble special (one of their nicer ones), with beautiful binding and illustrations, and simply called "Arabian Nights." It trimmed the 17 volumes of Burton down to one manageable tome, but even this thing is 735 pages of dense print. Still, it gives you a solid representation of the work, and includes all the stories most people have come to know from the public zeitgeist, all in a beautiful presentation.
Various sources for "Nights" have been identified from oral tradition and written fragments. Burton's translation has long been considered the definitive English version of the "Calcutta II" source material, though some controversy has existed as to whether or not he actually just adapted an earlier English translation from Thomas Payne. Regardless, Burton's version became the most famous... and notorious.
You know how some film fans love to collect and discuss sexploitation films from the Sixties and Seventies as high art? Ahem--"Salò"--ahem... Well, the Victorians did the same thing with literature. Therefore, Burton's "Nights" was titillating, exotic, racy stuff for leisure-class Europeans who fetishized the "Oriental," proudly able to display these volumes in their library because it wasn't pornography, just folklore. "I didn't write it!" you can almost hear Burton argue to offended English fuddy-duddies.
But Burton certainly knew that sex sells. So while Thomas Payne bowdlerized the buggery from his translation, Burton tended to focus on it, and even added footnotes about "Oriental" sexual practices. So we have tastefully depicted scenes of, uhh... oh, my... the "close buttock game"?
Yeah, that brings up another thing you should know. With some exceptions, women are largely sexpots, treacherous witches, or beaten wives in these stories. For example, there is a woman who has been held captive by a jinn who wants her as his consort. When she spies two sultans hiding in a tree while the jinn is sleeping, she doesn't ask them to free her. Instead, she demands that they both pleasure her or she'll awaken the jinn, and then she brags afterwards about how many men she's slept with this way, all in a grand scheme to avenge herself on her captor. That'll teach that dastardly jinn! And then there's the farmer whose wife insists he tell how he is able to understand the language of his animals. He says it was a gift bestowed to him from Allah upon pain of death if he betrays the secret. She doesn't care--she literally henpecks him to tell her even if it kills him. But he then overhears a wise rooster telling the family dog that the master should man up and teach his wife who's boss. So the farmer takes a stick and beats the hell out of his wife. She is then contrite and submissive, "as a wife should be," and all the servants and farmhands and neighbors and even her parents are happy. And there was much rejoicing. Yaaaay...!
I feel compelled to make one further comment about the sexual content of Burton's version that you might find interesting. I can't help but wonder if some of this stuff was coming from Burton's own headspace. A plot theme that is repeated ad nauseam is the cheating wife. You have lots of cuckolded husbands catching their wives in compromising positions with "blackamoor slaves," usually resulting in scimitar justice. Well, remember what I said about Burton's footnotes? Here's where his own words make his version of the "Nights" a further treasure trove of psychological inquiry.
The guy actually claims to have, during the course of his extensive travels, measured the penis sizes of African, Arab, and European men. Yep. First of all--why? Secondly, I call bullshit. But if it is true, how the hell did he pull this off (pun intended)? And his conclusion?
“In my time no honest hindi Moslem would take his womenfolk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there are thereby offered to them.”
Huge and enormous, huh? Kind of like the complete set of his "Nights" translation! Something tells me that Burton was a bit overfixated. And overcompensating. Whether or not the actual text he was translating eroticized black men, I suspect that if Burton were alive today, we could guess with fairly high accuracy what kind of terms he'd likely be typing in Google with Safesearch mode off.
So don't expect cute little children's morality stories here. Yes, this is an appropriate book to read and discuss for "Garbaugust"!
However, this is where the Anglican world does get such immortal tales as Sinbad and Alladin, even if those were not necessarily original to the first known historical omnibuses. You can see how easily these stories can be extrapolated as fun adventures for children, however ironic that may now seem in context. At its core, this is great fantasy that really captures the imagination, and it weaves images you'll never likely forget. Among others, you've got the classic jinn in a bottle trope, flying horse statues, ghouls, sorcerers, giant monsters, and the world's most talkative barber with his six unlucky brothers. Each story follows human beings navigating a crazy world that makes little sense, which they accept as matter of fact like the citizens of Tokyo in a daikaiju film. And most importantly, the "Nights" is an enduring cross-cultural testament to the power of storytelling. Many of the characters in this book save their lives by simply spinning a yarn!
The collection is also important because it has some of the earliest examples of narrative techniques we take for granted today. Ever heard of "Chekhov's Gun"? That's a literary term for an object (or person) that appears insignificant early in a plot, but which will play an important role later on. You see this kind of device throughout these stories, along with early examples of self-fulfilling prophecies and unreliable narrators.
My main complaint is that you can tell, even in my shortened edition, that many of these stories are recycled clones of themselves. They literally repeat the same themes, the same characters, and even the same lines! One of the more obvious examples is in the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, which ends up being more like three and a half voyages if you take out all the recurring elements. Case in point, Sinbad is always getting abandoned by his ship and then months later, he finds the captain again, who laments Sinbad's death. But inexplicably, the captain never recognizes him and so Sinbad has to convince him of his identity. Now, some academics cite this as the result of "leitwortstil," or purposeful repetition. Though there are certainly plenty of legitimate examples of this device throughout the "Nights," such as in some of the lines that signify Scheherazade's interruption of her bedtime stories due to daybreak, I think this repetitive nature largely is a remnant of the various oral traditions and fragments of the same story altered over multiple cultures and epochs with varying degrees of embellishment or editing. For this reason, traces of Greek mythology can even be found embedded in this text--Sinbad's encounter with a man-eating giant is exactly the same as that of Odysseus and the cyclops. Another example is the "Old Man of the Sea," a character with ancient roots as a manifestation of Poseidon, though his behavior in Sinbad's Fifth Voyage as an evil spirit who forces Sinbad to carry him on his back can be seen in Japanese and Slavic mythology. Similar entities who jump on the backs of travelers are seen in another Arabian Nights story, "The Tale of Prince Sayf al-Muluk." From an anthropological standpoint, this is all very interesting, but if you are reading this for entertainment, not so much, especially considering the style of language Burton uses is archaic even for 19th Century standards. So it can get monotonous, which is why I'll likely never read the complete Burton translation, or any full series for that matter.
But who knows? Maybe I will. Supposedly, Penguin's ten-volume set by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons is really good, and there is also a 2021 edition by Yasmine Seale which is the first ever English translation by a woman, and includes previously omitted stories featuring female protagonists. Those might be interesting to check out someday.
But if you are a "virgin" to this epic work, I would start with a shorter version to get a taste, and if you like it, move on to more expanded volumes. Just remember that this is for adults only!
SCORE: Four (ty) thieves out of Five
SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING: Scheherazade Op. 35 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
WORD OF THE DAY: Augury
There are many alternate titles for the countless versions of this ever-evolving work. Most commonly, it is known as "The Thousand and One Nights," because the framing device for the collection is that Scheherazade, the new wife of a misogynist king who kills his brides immediately after taking their virginity, delays her execution by entrancing him each of 1000 nights with a story. That's some serious pillow talk! And already you can see where I'm going with this review.
The most famous version is from Richard Francis Burton, who was an adventurer, and his travels brought him some notoriety, such as his two-year expedition to find the source of the Nile. Ever seen a picture of this dude? That's one tough-looking SOB! But he also used his experiences to be an accomplished writer. It became his passion project to make as complete a translation of these Islamic fairy tales for English-speakers as possible. An ambitious undertaking to say the least, because over the centuries, the amount of stories considered "canon" kept growing, so that Burton's original book, "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night," weighed in at 10 volumes. On top of that, he published a further 7 volumes that he called "The Supplemental Nights". Geez!
So before you ask--no, I have not read all 17 volumes of stories. Though I have dipped in to a variety of translations and read numerous excerpts from different collections, the version I read cover-to-cover was an abridged edition, which was printed as a Barnes and Noble special (one of their nicer ones), with beautiful binding and illustrations, and simply called "Arabian Nights." It trimmed the 17 volumes of Burton down to one manageable tome, but even this thing is 735 pages of dense print. Still, it gives you a solid representation of the work, and includes all the stories most people have come to know from the public zeitgeist, all in a beautiful presentation.
Various sources for "Nights" have been identified from oral tradition and written fragments. Burton's translation has long been considered the definitive English version of the "Calcutta II" source material, though some controversy has existed as to whether or not he actually just adapted an earlier English translation from Thomas Payne. Regardless, Burton's version became the most famous... and notorious.
You know how some film fans love to collect and discuss sexploitation films from the Sixties and Seventies as high art? Ahem--"Salò"--ahem... Well, the Victorians did the same thing with literature. Therefore, Burton's "Nights" was titillating, exotic, racy stuff for leisure-class Europeans who fetishized the "Oriental," proudly able to display these volumes in their library because it wasn't pornography, just folklore. "I didn't write it!" you can almost hear Burton argue to offended English fuddy-duddies.
But Burton certainly knew that sex sells. So while Thomas Payne bowdlerized the buggery from his translation, Burton tended to focus on it, and even added footnotes about "Oriental" sexual practices. So we have tastefully depicted scenes of, uhh... oh, my... the "close buttock game"?
Yeah, that brings up another thing you should know. With some exceptions, women are largely sexpots, treacherous witches, or beaten wives in these stories. For example, there is a woman who has been held captive by a jinn who wants her as his consort. When she spies two sultans hiding in a tree while the jinn is sleeping, she doesn't ask them to free her. Instead, she demands that they both pleasure her or she'll awaken the jinn, and then she brags afterwards about how many men she's slept with this way, all in a grand scheme to avenge herself on her captor. That'll teach that dastardly jinn! And then there's the farmer whose wife insists he tell how he is able to understand the language of his animals. He says it was a gift bestowed to him from Allah upon pain of death if he betrays the secret. She doesn't care--she literally henpecks him to tell her even if it kills him. But he then overhears a wise rooster telling the family dog that the master should man up and teach his wife who's boss. So the farmer takes a stick and beats the hell out of his wife. She is then contrite and submissive, "as a wife should be," and all the servants and farmhands and neighbors and even her parents are happy. And there was much rejoicing. Yaaaay...!
I feel compelled to make one further comment about the sexual content of Burton's version that you might find interesting. I can't help but wonder if some of this stuff was coming from Burton's own headspace. A plot theme that is repeated ad nauseam is the cheating wife. You have lots of cuckolded husbands catching their wives in compromising positions with "blackamoor slaves," usually resulting in scimitar justice. Well, remember what I said about Burton's footnotes? Here's where his own words make his version of the "Nights" a further treasure trove of psychological inquiry.
The guy actually claims to have, during the course of his extensive travels, measured the penis sizes of African, Arab, and European men. Yep. First of all--why? Secondly, I call bullshit. But if it is true, how the hell did he pull this off (pun intended)? And his conclusion?
“In my time no honest hindi Moslem would take his womenfolk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there are thereby offered to them.”
Huge and enormous, huh? Kind of like the complete set of his "Nights" translation! Something tells me that Burton was a bit overfixated. And overcompensating. Whether or not the actual text he was translating eroticized black men, I suspect that if Burton were alive today, we could guess with fairly high accuracy what kind of terms he'd likely be typing in Google with Safesearch mode off.
So don't expect cute little children's morality stories here. Yes, this is an appropriate book to read and discuss for "Garbaugust"!
However, this is where the Anglican world does get such immortal tales as Sinbad and Alladin, even if those were not necessarily original to the first known historical omnibuses. You can see how easily these stories can be extrapolated as fun adventures for children, however ironic that may now seem in context. At its core, this is great fantasy that really captures the imagination, and it weaves images you'll never likely forget. Among others, you've got the classic jinn in a bottle trope, flying horse statues, ghouls, sorcerers, giant monsters, and the world's most talkative barber with his six unlucky brothers. Each story follows human beings navigating a crazy world that makes little sense, which they accept as matter of fact like the citizens of Tokyo in a daikaiju film. And most importantly, the "Nights" is an enduring cross-cultural testament to the power of storytelling. Many of the characters in this book save their lives by simply spinning a yarn!
The collection is also important because it has some of the earliest examples of narrative techniques we take for granted today. Ever heard of "Chekhov's Gun"? That's a literary term for an object (or person) that appears insignificant early in a plot, but which will play an important role later on. You see this kind of device throughout these stories, along with early examples of self-fulfilling prophecies and unreliable narrators.
My main complaint is that you can tell, even in my shortened edition, that many of these stories are recycled clones of themselves. They literally repeat the same themes, the same characters, and even the same lines! One of the more obvious examples is in the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, which ends up being more like three and a half voyages if you take out all the recurring elements. Case in point, Sinbad is always getting abandoned by his ship and then months later, he finds the captain again, who laments Sinbad's death. But inexplicably, the captain never recognizes him and so Sinbad has to convince him of his identity. Now, some academics cite this as the result of "leitwortstil," or purposeful repetition. Though there are certainly plenty of legitimate examples of this device throughout the "Nights," such as in some of the lines that signify Scheherazade's interruption of her bedtime stories due to daybreak, I think this repetitive nature largely is a remnant of the various oral traditions and fragments of the same story altered over multiple cultures and epochs with varying degrees of embellishment or editing. For this reason, traces of Greek mythology can even be found embedded in this text--Sinbad's encounter with a man-eating giant is exactly the same as that of Odysseus and the cyclops. Another example is the "Old Man of the Sea," a character with ancient roots as a manifestation of Poseidon, though his behavior in Sinbad's Fifth Voyage as an evil spirit who forces Sinbad to carry him on his back can be seen in Japanese and Slavic mythology. Similar entities who jump on the backs of travelers are seen in another Arabian Nights story, "The Tale of Prince Sayf al-Muluk." From an anthropological standpoint, this is all very interesting, but if you are reading this for entertainment, not so much, especially considering the style of language Burton uses is archaic even for 19th Century standards. So it can get monotonous, which is why I'll likely never read the complete Burton translation, or any full series for that matter.
But who knows? Maybe I will. Supposedly, Penguin's ten-volume set by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons is really good, and there is also a 2021 edition by Yasmine Seale which is the first ever English translation by a woman, and includes previously omitted stories featuring female protagonists. Those might be interesting to check out someday.
But if you are a "virgin" to this epic work, I would start with a shorter version to get a taste, and if you like it, move on to more expanded volumes. Just remember that this is for adults only!
SCORE: Four (ty) thieves out of Five
SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING: Scheherazade Op. 35 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
WORD OF THE DAY: Augury
March 22, 2020
It was ok, kind of boring, but it was school reading material so for that it was pretty good.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews