Laiyang I’m on volume six of Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume translation of the Arabian Nights. I intend to write a bit on this topic when I am done with the whole, but as that will be at a far-future date, I wish to set down some of my amazement with this work. The vast scope of the whole, with its richness of images, is alone sufficient to justify its classic status, but it is also amazing to see Burton peering into it as a mirror to the wholeness of his soul. Even the index makes for stunning reading. In the sixth volume, which contains the stories of Sinbad which are suitable for any child, you find these items in the index:
Sierre Abd al-Samad = slave of the eternal … 221
Abyssinians (hardly to be called blackamoors)… 63
Amalekites … 264, 265
Anbar (Ambar) = ambergris … 60
Angels (ride piebalds) … 146
Apodosis omitted … 203, 239
Apes (isle of) … 23
(and their lustful propensities) … 54
Asoka’s wife and Kunala … 127
Bab al-Nasr = Gate of Victory (at Cairo) … 234
Bath (suggesting freshness from coition) … 135
(and privy favourite haunts of the Jinns) … 141
(not to be entered by men without drawers) 150
Biunes, bisexuals, and women robed with the sun 168
Bathsheba and Uriah, and their congeners … 129
Batini = a gnostic, a reprobate … 221
Cairene vulgarism … 278
Camel (seen in a dream is an omen of death; why?) 92
Camphor (primitive way of extracting it) … 21
Cannibals and Cannibalism … 36
Ceylon (Ar. Sarandib) … 64, 81
Cocoa-nut (Ar. Jauz al-Hindi) … 55
Colossochelys = colossal tortoise … 33
This just goes on and on. Like Melville and the whale, it seems that Burton saw the entire world in this one thing.
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