Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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more than from any philosophical argument, that the poem’s author derives his conviction that no religious system can contain universal truth; at best each one grasps some fragment of the meaning that every human group seeks to wrest from the world in order to give value to its own form of life.
All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes
his little bit the whole to own.
But this is no mere banal affirmation of diversity. Quoting Pope’s line “whatever is, is right,” “F.B.” at once accepts and upends it: “Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is wrong.”66
Applied to the interweaving of claims to universal truth with the particular forms of life they seek to validate, Burton’s variation on Pope’s maxim stands as a generalized declaration that the “self-spun webs of significance” that are human cultures are interwoven with threads of nonsense. Achieving a liberating distance from them is the precondition for acquiring genuine knowledge and understanding: “he knows not how to know / who knows not also how to unknow.” One particular point on which Haji Abdu offered such skeptically grounded knowledge was that there exists no spiritual realm independent of material reality, and that therefore the soul was not an entity separate from the body. The soul was one of those “words that gender things. … Sufficeth not the breath of life / to work the matterborn machine?” Burton elaborated this mix of materialism and skepticism in part by drawing on Enlightenment thinking; the Kasidah quoted both Voltaire and Diderot, and its author surely knew that Montesquieu had preceded him in warning against the limited and parochial perspective from which peoples stake their claims to cosmic significance. Haji Abdu followed the author of the Persian Letters in finding both irony and grounds for modesty in the way that creatures who live on a mere “dot in the universe” propose themselves “as an exact model for providence.”67
But the particular inflection the Kasidah gave these notions put Burton closer to an intellectual figure of his own time, Friedrich Nietzsche. Burton’s skepticism about culturally rooted notions of morality and truth led him to speak in radically individualist terms very close to those Nietzsche would use in connection with the figure he called the Übermensch,the heroic personality who creates life-sustaining values wholly from within, summoning up the deep power that lesser individuals both lack and fear. “He noblest lives and noblest dies / who makes and keeps his self-made laws,” the Kasidah proclaims in one place, and in another, “Be thine own Deus: make self free, / liberal as the circling air.” Nietzsche’s path to similar formulations was more complex and more philosophically sophisticated than Burton’s, but he too drew part of the inspiration for them from the recognition that every human culture, in setting up what Zarathustra called a “tablet of good” for itself, at once releases the force of human creativity and imprisons it within limits, erecting barriers against the very powers that humanity might employ to raise itself to a higher and freer mode of existence.68 Burton shared with Nietzsche the sense that the path to such liberation lay through people recognizing themselves as the sole source of their beliefs and values, and of the supposedly divine beings that proclaim and enforce them, thereby regaining access to the creative powers cultures obstruct in the very moment of releasing them.
In proclaiming this radical message, Stone Talk and the Kasidah also shine a light on the link Burton himself recognized between it and his condition of living between cultures. Already in writings of the 1840s, as we saw above, he associated the skepticism and materialism he would advocate in his later works with Indians whose intellectual independence was made possible by their simultaneous connection to two competing belief systems. This was the case with certain Amils who “become Dahri, or materialists” through reflecting on the similarities and differences between their traditional Hinduism and the Muslim beliefs of their neighbors; they acknowledged a deity, but one uncoupled “from all revelation,” and embodying “the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications.” Only a few of these materialists became outright atheists, but those who did were more likely than European unbelievers to urge their conclusions on others. Burton’s involvement in Eastern religions and forms of life played a parallel role in the evolution that drew him to a similar advocacy, a connection he acknowledged by choosing Hindu and Muslim spokesmen for himself in his two verse books. These connections would be reaffirmed in the project that capped his career in the 1880s, his translation of the Thousand and One Nights; but we will see that in it he declared Islam to be no less in need of rescue from the limits all cultures impose on their members than was the complex of British values and attitudes whose narrow puritanism he had long bemoaned.
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The stories that make up the Thousand and One Nights had been popular in the West since their first translation into a European language by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717; a number of English versions were made from Galland’s French text both in his century and the next, and the exotic and magical qualities of the tales made them staples of popular literature, especially for children. But Galland’s version was far from complete, and his choice of what stories to include was shaped partly by a passion for fairy tales that made him see the Nights chiefly as a source for them, and partly by his desire to produce a book that would not offend moral sensibilities. Very similar motives assured that the English version made from his text and even some early attempts to go back to the Arabic original in the early 1800s would suffer from many of the same limits.
Burton was not the first person to seek a more authentic rendering; in his time two English Arabists preceded him in bringing out new versions of the tales. The first was Edward W. Lane, whose earlier book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), provided a major source of knowledge about Arab and Muslim life for many in the nineteenth century, including Burton. Lane had dressed and lived in the manner of a local during the two years he spent in Cairo in the 1820s, gathering material for his book and learning Arabic. He later produced an Arabic-English dictionary still regularly used by scholars today. His translation of the Nights has both admirers and detractors (Burton among the latter), but whatever its virtues it was far from complete, leaving out whatever he considered “objectionable” or “licentious.” Much closer to what Burton had in mind was the work of a younger Arabist, John Payne, the first to produce a complete version (around four times the length of Galland’s, and three times that of Lane), of which the first volume appeared in 1882. Burton greeted it with praise, judging its success in rendering difficult passages so complete that “all future translators must perforce use the same expression under pain of falling far short.” In a letter to Payne he acknowledged the younger man’s priority and promised not to put out his own version until the other’s was complete; the friendly relations between the two led each to dedicate a volume to the other. Despite this, much controversy has grown up around their relations, some accusing Burton of simply stealing from Payne. This judgment is almost certainly too harsh (Fawn Brodie has given a balanced and sensible defense of Burton in her biography), but there seems no doubt that Burton made considerable use of Payne’s text in producing his own, and it may well be that his own version would not have been ready for publication in 1885 (or ever) if Payne’s work had not been available to him.69
For us, however, these questions matter far less than the role the translation played in Burton’s larger involvement with Arab and Muslim culture. He saw his work on the Nights as “a natural outcome of my Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah,” noting that while on his way he stayed for some weeks with a physician friend, John Steinhaeuser, who lived in Aden and shared his fascination for the tales, and that the two agreed to collaborate on the “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated translation” they both wished to see. The plan was for Steinhaeuser to work on prose passages and Burton on verse ones, but these hopes collapsed when Steinhaeuser died suddenly while still in his fifties. Whatever work he had done was lost, leaving Burton with the need to start pretty much from scratch. In his foreword he described the book, arduous as it appeared (especially because of the extensive apparatus of notes, many of them learned and extensive essays on matters grammatical, religious, or social), as “a labor of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction,”