Library of Babel
10365 Le Mille e una Notte secondo Burton
Richard Francis Burton. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1981 I ed. .
Language: Italian
In Trieste in 1872, a gentleman whose face is marred by an African scar – British Consul, Captain Richard Francis Burton, – undertook a famous translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, a selection of which is included in this publication.
Of the solitary craft of writing Burton had made something valiant and plural: he would start working at dawn, in a vast living room the multiplied space of his eleven desks, each one with the material for a book – a few of these desks adorned by a bright jasmine in a glass of water. Leafing through The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in Sir Richard’s translation is no less incredible than perusing them them ‘literally translated from Arabic and commented on’ by Sinbad the Sailor. The criticalities Burton addressed and solved with his work are innumerable, but we can conveniently reduce them to three: he was able to justify and expand his reputation as an Arabist; he ostentatiously diverged from Lane; and he managed to capture the interest of 19th-century British gentlemen with a written version of 13th-century Muslim oral tales. The result is a version of the tales benefitting from the prose of a legendary translator.