Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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to these other places that he described Arabia in the terms we noted earlier, as “the land of my predilection … a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.”
Burton invoked this sense of having an especially intimate connection to the Nights and its world in explaining why he thought his version of the tales was still needed despite the existence of all the earlier ones. His object was “to show what ‘The Thousand Nights and a Night’ really is,” not by translating the text literally, word for word, but “by writing as the Arab would have written in English.” Burton would probably have acknowledged that both Edward Lane and John Payne had the linguistic capacity to pursue such a goal, but neither in his view identified enough with the spirit and tenor of the tales to undertake it—Lane because he remained an Evangelical Christian, and Payne out of reticence. “My work claims to be a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book, by preserving intact, not only the spirit, but even the mécanique, the manner and the matter.” The last sentence brings to mind his attempt in the pilgrimage book to convey both the workings and the spirit of what went on at Medina and Mecca through careful attention to the details of the rituals, participation in the feelings aroused in other pilgrims, and a literal and sympathetic enunciation of the prayer texts.
But the project of the Nights had a second side, namely achieving what was the “glory” of the translator: “to add something to his native tongue,” providing new and expressive metaphors and turns of speech. He hoped these novel words or phrases would enter English as equivalents for “the tropes and figures which the Arabic language often packs into a single term.” To offer them required that the translator gamble on the willingness of readers to accept the new coinages as an enrichment of English rather than a defection from it: “I have never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as ‘she snorted and snarked,’ fully to represent the original. These, like many in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency.” Seeking to enrich his own language in this way gave his intercultural existence a new dimension. Hitherto his Arab involvements had chiefly focused on himself, expanding or deepening his personal existence; here he turned the interchange in the opposite direction, reinvesting the fruits of his efforts in the native cultural ground that was still his own.
Intertwined with this aim was the one Burton pursued in the Kasidah and Stone Talk, using an expanded consciousness to show the arbitrary nature of the moral and intellectual limits cultures impose on their members, so as to encourage a certain degree of escape from them. It was especially in the realm of erotic experience that he saw the Nights as contributing to this liberation. Exposure to Eastern ways showed the provincial nature of Western sexual mores both in regard to certain particular topics and in attitudes toward sex more generally. The two particular matters were same-sex relationships and the amatory lives of women. Burton was less than consistent in regard to the first: he employed a general argument to defend homosexuality against the notion common in his time that it was “unnatural,” countering that whatever human beings do is natural to them. But when he set out to show that same-sex relations were more common and widespread outside Europe than within it, it was only male homosexuality he considered; sex between women did not enter the picture. We may never know whether Burton himself ever engaged in sex with other men, but he clearly had a fascination with it (going back at least to his days in Sind), and in the Terminal Essay that concluded his translation of the Nights he used the diverse attitudes taken toward it in different places to underscore the arbitrary nature of cultural restrictions (he also offered some possible explanations for the differences, but we must leave them aside here). He did not recommend that Europeans follow these examples in regard to same-sex relations, but clearly thought that Westerners could profit from an understanding of Eastern attitudes toward female sexuality; these were premised on a widespread sense that women no less than men had a right to sexual satisfaction, and that men had a responsibility to provide it. Such a stance made for more harmonious and more mutually respectful relationships, raising the general level of happiness.70
All these aspects of actual sexual practice were deeply tied up in his mind with a less physical side of erotic life, namely the power of desire to nurture imagination and fantasy. In this regard linguistic norms were no less significant than behavioral ones, and Burton gave much attention to the contrast between the Western and especially British penchant for casting a veil of prudish reticence over sexual matters, and the taken-for-granted Eastern expectation that people could and should speak directly and unreservedly about them. Burton’s advocacy of freer sexual talk was never absolute (he resisted putting his translation of the Nights in the hands of girls and young women), but it was clearly part of a sense that involvement in Eastern practices could liberate Westerners from the restrictions they senselessly imposed on themselves. He defended the “dirty talk” (turpiloquium) both in his foreword to the first volume and in the Terminal Essay that concludes the last, agreeing with many in his own time and since that what counts as gross or indecent language changes with time and place, insisting in particular that (as the eighteenth-century English orientalist William Jones said about Indians) many peoples to the east of Europe have never considered “that anything natural can be offensively obscene,” and enjoying the irony with which an early French traveler described the Japanese as “so crude that they only know to call things by their names.” Burton made it clear, however, that this ease of dealing with things only gingerly touched by his contemporaries did not lower the level of the Nights as a whole; on the contrary (and I think any fair and attentive reader will agree), “The general tone of The Nights is exceptionally high and pure. … The pathos is sweet, deep and genuine; tender, simple and true. … Its life, strong, splendid and multitudinous, is everywhere flavored with that unaffected pessimism and constitutionals melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven” that (translating the words that Burton quoted, as he often did, in Latin) “human life is but a brief escape from death.” What the tales lacked was not civility but what some in the nineteenth century took to be refinement: “innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart, and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect hypocrisy.”71
The overall implications of this defense of liberated speech only emerge when we note that Burton did not view the power of the Nights to undermine cultural limits as limited to Europeans: it operated in the East, too, by virtue of the tales’ ability to give free rein to a human capacity for cultural inventiveness against which Islam set up barriers no less rigid than those imposed by Christianity. Burton’s attention to this aspect of the collection has at least two features that have not been sufficiently appreciated, first his insistence on regarding the stories as a hybrid product of two cultures and religions, one Persian-Zoroastrian, the other Arab-Muslim, and second the way that his emphasis on this mixing led him to view Mohammed and his achievement in a more negative light than he had before.
Several earlier scholars and writers (including Galland, the first European translator) had maintained that the main body of the tales originated not in the Arab lands but in Persia before the advent of Islam, but others contested the point, including Lane. His authority gave the claim new currency, so that Burton’s emphasis on it formed part of what made his approach distinctive. The arguments need not detain us much; they involve the Persian origins of the chief figures’ names, including Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad, and references in early Arabic sources to the Persian originals of the collection. Burton maintained that over time Arabic names and historical figures were inserted by “a host of editors, scribes and copyists,” who also converted “the florid and rhetorical Persian” into “the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic,” at the same time giving Arabic names to the originally Zoroastrian gods, spirits, and kings. These changes affected all three of the basic types of stories in the Nights, animal fables, historical anecdotes, and fairy tales, but it was especially the last category that was “wholly and purely Persian,” and it was from it that the collection derived its remarkable power over readers. Even in Galland’s corrupt and limited version, compelled by “deference to public taste [a century before Victoria, and in France] to expunge the often repulsive simplicity, the childish indecencies and the wild orgies of the original,” and which clothed