Preface for The Arabian Nights

Preface for The Arabian Nights
Easton Press, 2009
Phil Rice

The ancient Indian, Arabian, and Persian tales known as The Arabian Nights first appeared in a fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript. Because of the way they are related, the stories are also known as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Most readers are familiar with the framework: Shahryar, emperor of Persia and India, having observed the treachery of his brother’s wife and of his own, vowed that he would marry a new wife everyday and have her executed the next morning. But when the wise Scheherezade became the emperor’s wife, she devised on a scheme to save the young women of Persia. On the night of her marriage to Shahryar, she began to tell him a tale which fascinated him so much that he postponed her death for one more night so that he could learn the end of the story. Scheherezade told him stories for a thousand and one nights. Convinced of her worthiness and goodness, he ultimately let her live and made her his consort.

In the course of the thousand and one nights, Scheherezade related some 273 tales. Some were so long that they took her as many as seventeen nights; others were short enough for two to be told in a single night. The tales selected for this volume are the most popular ones of all. They are presented not in the bowdlerized language of editions intended for children, but in the unexpurgated, vigorous version of the greatest translator of The Arabian Nights, the extraordinary nineteenth century man of letters, Richard Burton.

In addition to being a prolific author and translator, Sir Richard Francis Burton was a linguist and explorer of considerable fame in his lifetime. Born in 1821 in Torquay, a seaside resort on the southwest coast of England, Burton spent much of his childhood in the company of the Romany people, and his love of travel and his insatiable interest in other peoples can be traced to this early association. A carefree and restless youth, he traveled extensively throughout France and Italy and in the process established a firm foundation for his extensive knowledge of an eclectic mix of languages and cultures.

Never particularly suited for the halls of academia, Burton was actually expelled from Oxford University for challenging a fellow student to a duel. Fortunately he was already well into the study of Arabic before his expulsion. He then enlisted in the Army of the British East India Company, not out of a desire for martial experience but rather as an unconventional means of furthering his education. His dexterity for language was astonishing, and he quickly added a proficiency in Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, and Persian to his growing repertoire of fluencies.

Burton always displayed an uncanny ability to mix with the locals of whatever region he visited, and he was often able to quickly pass as a native in both language and appearance, frequently deceiving his fellow soldiers in the process. He gained a remarkable familiarity with Eastern culture during his seven years in India, even venturing into the study of Indian prostitution—a rather shocking endeavor in the minds of his countrymen but an endeavor that would bode him well in many of his future projects. In 1853 he undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca, an excursion which would gain him considerable public attention as he became the first Englishman to enter Mohammed’s sacred birthplace. His preparation for the pilgrimage began during his tenure in Sind where he lived and worked disguised as a Muslim. He was so intent at total immersion during this preparation that he had himself circumcised in order to avoid detection. The following year he journeyed to Harrar, the Somali capital, which had likewise never previously been entered by an Englishman. Since his journey to Mecca was approved by the Royal Geographical Society, his career as a professional explorer was underway, and the journal he would publish in 1855, The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah, became one of the early landmarks of his career as a skilled and prolific wordsmith.

As a result of his newfound celebrity status as an explorer, Burton was commissioned by the British government to search for the sources of the Nile River. In 1858, during this expedition, he and an associate discovered Lake Tanganyika. After his return, the Foreign Office employed him as consul in Spanish Guinea, Brazil, Syria, and Trieste. Practically every adventure experienced by Burton resulted in a book of one kind or another, but the most celebrated by far is The Thousand Nights and a Night, which occupied most of his leisure time in Trieste and was privately printed in Benares, India, in sixteen volumes from 1885 to 1888. Professor Stanley Lane-Poole calls the work a monument to the translator’s Arabic learning and encyclopedic knowledge of Eastern life: “Burton’s vocabulary was marvelously extensive, and he had had a genius for hitting upon the right word.”

His permanent place in the pantheon of great translators was enhanced when he undertook the translation of a trilogy of classic erotica. With Burton’s translation of the Kama Sutra in 1883, the unsuspecting English audience discovered a practical guidebook that did not purport to be a medical treatise but was instead a sacred document discussing the subject of sexuality without the encumbrance of morality. As Burton surmises, the Kama Sutra espouses ideas “which have gradually filtered down through the sands of time, and which seem to prove that the human nature of today is much the same as the human nature of the long ago.”

He translated the text of the Ananga Ranga into English in 1885, but the erotic contents were considered too graphic for the public, and therefore the first English edition was published “for the Kama shastra society of London and Benares, and for private circulation only.” The book would not be “officially” published in until the 1960s following a lengthy court case. He would publish The Perfumed Garden in 1886, one year after the Ananga Ranga, to complete his trilogy of sacred erotic literature. The Perfumed Garden was so controversial in its day that after his death in 1890 his widow burned the manuscript out of fear that it would ruin his literary reputation. Fortunately for later generations, printed copies survived the purge, and the Burton translations of The Perfumed Garden, the Ananga Ranga, and the Kama Sutra have continued to grow in stature and are today universally recognized classics of world literature.

During his lifetime Burton learned over twenty-five languages and at least forty dialects. His travels took him to Asia, Africa, and South America. His published journals and ethnographic studies from these journeys were very well-received by the English public, but the book that caused the greatest stir within British literary circles—even more than his translations of Eastern amatory manuals—was his unexpurgated translation of The Arabian Nights, which he titled The Thousand Nights and a Night. Published in sixteen volumes between 1885 and 1888, Burton used The Thousand Nights and a Night to demonstrate his profound knowledge of Muslim life, a knowledge that included intimate details of the sexual mores and customs as well as more standard topics of academic discussion.

The illustrations for this unique edition of The Arabian Nights are not by a medieval Persian artist, as might be assumed by the style, but by the twentieth century’s most celebrated Western painter of miniatures, Arthur Szyk. During his lifetime he became widely known for his declaration that “Art is not my aim; it is my means,” and his talents were highly touted among international art aficionados as well as by the public-at-large. A contemporary art critic for the Times of London declared Szyk’s art to “be among the most beautiful . . . ever produced by the hand of man.” After a careful study of Szyk’s work, celebrated art critic Thomas Craven was moved to say, “I know of no other instance in which the decorative apparatus of miniature painting has been combined with the onslaught of direct cartooning to produce an instrument of such deadly effectiveness.”

Arthur Szyk was born in Lodz, Poland in 1894. During Poland’s war against the Soviet Bolsheviks, he served as artistic director for the Polish army regiment quartered in Lodz, and he spent his apprenticeship years as an artist in Paris and Cracow. His first art show, held in Paris in 1924, consisted mainly of miniature paintings in the Persian style. Ten years later he traveled to the United States to exhibit his work, a tour highlighted by his exhibit at the Library of Congress of a series of thirty-eight miniatures commemorating George Washington and the Revolutionary War. While on this official visit, he received the George Washington Bicentennial Medal awarded by the U.S. Congress.

He moved to the United States in 1940 in the face of Nazi occupation of his native Poland, and he subsequently became America’s leading political caricaturist during World War II. He felt an immediate kinship with his new country, proclaiming “At last, I have found the home I have always searched for. Here I can speak of what my soul feels. There is no other place on earth that gives one the freedom, liberty and justice that America does.” He naturally expressed his feelings for his adopted homeland in his art, producing miniatures representing the diversity and imagery of American society and its favored landmarks. His subjects include Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pony Express. As part of its millennium celebration in the year 2000, the Library of Congress appropriately exhibited Szyk’s art a second time.

Szyk’s illuminations are magnificent works of art that cut across generational and geographical boundaries. No where is this point in greater evidence than in his illustrations for The Arabian Nights, and his artistic vision is a perfect fit for the tone of Burton’s translation. Szyk illustrated other great literary works as well, most notably a edition of Haggadah printed in 1940 that beautifully reflects his passion for his Jewish heritage as well as his concern for the horrors then being faced by the Jewish people of Nazi-occupied Europe. Two books devoted exclusively to his art were published in his lifetime, The New Order (1941) and Ink & Blood (1946), each regarded as being an incomparable presentation of twentieth century art.

The frontispiece portrait of Scheherezade commissioned for this edition was created in batik by Judy Glaser. Batik, a national art in Indonesia, is a technique of hand-printing a fabric by covering with removable wax the parts that will not be dyed. Traditional colors include indigo, dark brown and white, which represents the three major Hindu gods. Entirely self-taught, Glaser’s work demonstrates her intimate experience with a variety of batik forms, including Japanese and Indonesian. Beginning with a pure cotton fabric, Glaser has executed this particular work in eleven colors. Some of the colors were carefully applied by hand while others are a result of an immersion process. Her work is much in demand and has been commissioned for use in the interior décor of public buildings as well as in private homes. Her knowledge and understanding of this complex art form is vast, and she taught and lectured at prestigious halls of academia throughout the United States.

The elegant book design for this edition is the handiwork of Doug and Lynn Welch of the Wordshop, a typography studio located in Waynesboro, Virginia. Well-known for its fine craftsmanship and careful attention to detail in all phases of book design, the Wordshop is staffed by artisans of proven skill and accomplishment who have been involved with the design and typography of literally hundreds of books. Examples of their art and craft can be found in libraries and bookshops across the globe, and their exquisite touch has also graced more than a few special volumes bearing the Easton Press imprint along the way. The font they have specially selected for the text of The Arabian Nights is Schindler, a perfect aesthetic match for the Persian mood of the tales.

The Schindler font style was created by Steve Jackaman, a type and graphic arts expert who started Red Rooster Typefounders foundry in 1990 with a team of highly-skilled type designers, typographers, and software experts as the core of his production team. Over the next four years, this team designed and produced nearly 200 original and exclusive typestyles. In 1995 Jackaman formed a new corporation called International TypeFounders, Inc., which has subsequently produced over 300 additional original and exclusive typefaces under the new brand name Rabbit Reproductions Typefoundry. They are rightly considered the leading source for original font design in the world.

The assemblage of such extraordinary talent combined with the finest bookmaking materials available ensures that this is not only the definitive text but unquestionably the most visually appealing edition of The Arabian Nights ever produced. The genuine leather binding is adorned with gold stamping on the front and back covers and further accented by 22kt gold stamping on the spine, and the book boasts gold gilt on all three edges. All of these superlative elements of book production are characteristics for which Easton Press books are known throughout the world, and The Arabian Nights is thus accurately presented as being one of The Hundred Greatest Books Ever Written.