burton--1001-nights--sample

Lastly he printed only one volume of a series which completed would
have contained nine or ten.
That amiable and devoted Arabist, the late Edward William Lane
does not score a success in his “New Translation of the Tales of a
Thousand and One Nights” (London: Charles Knight and Co.,
MDCCCXXXIX.) of which there have been four English editions,
besides American, two edited by E. S. Poole. He chose the abbreviating
Bulak Edition; and, of its two hundred tales, he has omitted about
half and by far the more characteristic half: the work was intended
for “the drawing-room table;” and, consequently, the workman was
compelled to avoid the “objectionable” and aught “approaching to
licentiousness.” He converts the Arabian Nights into the Arabian
Chapters, arbitrarily changing the division and, worse still, he converts
some chapters into notes. He renders poetry by prose and apologises
for not omitting it altogether: he neglects assonance and he is at once
too Oriental and not Oriental enough. He had small store of Arabic at
the time — Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary — and his
pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three
handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale’s Koran by their
anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un-English words, and the stiff
and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the
worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to
the student, but utterly out of place for readers of “The Nights;” republished,
as these notes have been separately (London, Chatto, 1883),
they are an ethnological text book.
Mr. John Payne has printed, for the Villon Society and for private
circulation only, the first and sole complete translation of the great
compendium, “comprising about four times as much matter as that of
Galland, and three times as much as that of any other translator;” and
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