Customer Reviews

The Arabian Nights (Modern Library)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Richard Burton's translation of "The Arabian Nights" is one of the oldest in existence and some people have a problem with this version; it's too old, antiquated, etc.; but for this reviewer, the very fact that it's an early translation lends the tales much of their charm; it underscores the fact that "The Arabian Nights" go back for hundreds of years, all the way back to "once upon a time". Richard Burton introduces us to Sharazad, that seductive storyteller who took the bull by the horns and dared to marry the sultan Shariyar who had been driven mad by the infidelity of his former wife and tried to exorcise the demons of her adultery by marrying a new wife every morning and slaying her that same night. Sharazad knows that a good tale can tame the savage beast much in the way music can, and she keeps the Sultan enchanted night after night with the tales that still enchant us in our own time. We all know about Aladdin and his magic lamp, and Ali Baba and the forty thieves, but there are loads of other treasures in this collection; my personal favorites, aside from Ali Baba, are the story of Ali the Persian (short, succinct, and very funny), and The Lady and Her Five Suitors, a hilarious tale of a woman who lures five men into a trap and then runs off with her boyfriend. And Sharazad, smart lady that she is, took care to insure her own future; not only does she regale her sultan with a thousand and one tales in as many nights, she also presents him with three children during that time, wins the heart of the sultan, and, we suppose, lives happily ever after.

No one knows where the tales originated. Burton suggests that the earliest may date from they 8th century A.D., and the latest may have been as recent as the 16th century, only 200 years before Antoine de Galland translated the tales into French and unfolded them like a magic carpet before the astonished and delighted eyes of his European readers. Burton translated them into English into English in 1885 and they have been weaving their own spell of enchantment for us ever since. When we open "The Arabian Nights" we step onto our own magic carpet and we're off on a ride of fun and fantasy that lasts until the last page when we close the book and come back down, reluctantly, to earth.

This is a phenomenal selection of the intricate web of fantasy commonly known as the "Arabian Nights."

Captain Burton's translation remains contested amongst scholars for its subjective indulgement and commentary (among other things). Nevertheless, his was a critical and monumental 16-volume endeavor that brought to the English world the legendary tales Shahrazad told King Shahryar--who exectued his mistresses after one night so as to preserve fidelity--in order to remain alive. It proved the most comprhensive and entertaining, and stands as the definitive translation for many.

But why should you bother with Burton, when you could go with Lane or Galland? As a reader, if your desire is to fully experience these tales as closely as possible in capturing that sense of adventure, excitement, of magic and morality that has fascinated imaginations for centuries, Burton's "plain literal translation" certainly dazzles and entertains, vividly, powerfully, without disappointment. You shall be drawn into the world of the thousand nights and a night, of Islam and Jinns, through Burton's archaic though eloquent diction--a part of the veil of fantasy--and his ample knowledge of Middle Eastern culture.
The present edition offers a vital, "representative" selection of these neatly woven and intertwining tales in one volume.

* Note: This can be fun, very enjoyable reading with patience, but the lack of paragraph breaks and the language may prove challenging for some.
Also: the hardcover is definitely a better choice, as it has placed the selected footnotes on the bottom of the page they appear on rather than the back of the book - like the paperback.

We are all familiar with the stories of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sinbad. But where did these tales come from? The answer lies in this wonderful (condensed) volume known as the 'Arabian Nights.'
The story is of a woman, Scheherazade, who marries a king. The king's custom is to spend one night with a woman and execute her in the morning. To avoid this, Scheherazade tells him a tale, but leaves part of it unfinished, thus gaining the king's interest and insuring her survival for another day so she can finish the tale. Being clever, she never finishes it, but keeps it continuously going, until the king finally spares her life.
The stories presented here, though often somewhat crude, have great moral lessons to be learned. The serve as a sort of moral reminder as to how a good person should act.
When Richard Burton translated the Nights, he collected as many manuscripts as possible and pieced together the tales. Many had been created centuries earlier, and were often told during gatherings among friends. Burton, through his unparalelled knack for translation, managed to capture all the magic and mystery that are the Arabian Nights.
Besides the delightful stories and good lessons to be learned, the Nights serve another purpose--they provide an intimate look at the culture of the time. By examining their legends, one can gain a basic understanding of how Arabic culture functions. There is as much to be learned about the people who tell these stories as there is from the stories themselves.
I read this book for historical and cultural value, and found it to be abundant in both. Besides that, though, I encountered a mesmerizing set of tales which will be entertaining to any audience, even (after some revision and editing) children.

This is the story of Shahrazad, the wife of a king,who tells tales well
enough to save her life. Her husband, King Shahryar, has been
following the edict that he must kill his wives after their first night
together. For a thousand and one nights Shahrazad tells tales that
capures the king's attention causing him to let her live in order to hear the end of each tale and finally to fall in love with her.

The tales themselves are prose in action. The lessons are
plentiful and still relevant today. This is a book that will enrich a reader's life, one that a family could read aloud to each other
and have fun. A great classic not to be missed.

I've looked at the two most recent translations of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS and googled about ten professional reviews of each of them. They are pretty universally reckoned accurate but a little bit lifeless. What is more, neither is complete. The three-volume Penguin edition "streamlines" the stories, that is, abridges each one by cutting repetitions, as the introduction admits; the Hadawy translation translates an early (arguably the original) short version of the NIGHTS, about 120 nights long.

By contrast the Burton translation is complete and full of life, as well as wild sex-crazed footnotes from a great scholar.

People will tell you Burton uses strange words, but he does so at the rate of about one every four pages, and those words can either be looked up or skipped. He's much easier than Shakespeare, and his ornate sentences are much easier than Henry James's. He even reproduces the Arabic rhymed prose, and that's a heck of a lot of fun in itself. Try a sample: if you like one page, you'll like the whole thing. If you don't like it, go for the modern Penguin version, faster and duller. NOT particularly more accurate, though of course a century after Burton, people have found mistakes in his translation here and there. They're not big, important mistakes; these are fairy tales, after all, and most earlier translators downright changed the stories around to suit themselves: as far as that sort of thing goes, Burton is very accurate indeed.

Mobi does way the best job on keying the footnotes to the text so they're easy to get to. There's its usual good indexing, and my goodness the price! I had this version on my bookcase in 16 volumes; the Kindle version costs much less and is more fun to read.

This is a sometimes brutal, mostly wonderful, anthology of tales weaved into the story of a corageous young woman who uses her enchanting narration as a means of survival. All of the magical stories take place in a long gone world with cultural differences that might offend sensitive readers. Yet the morals of the book never clash with our present values and it provides us with a look into a world since forgotten. The tales and fables are ingeniously connected, stories within stories, and are captivating and full of fantastic characters, wonderful places and legendary creatures. This is the source of many common children stories such as Aladin and the Genie, The travels of Sinbad, and Ali-Baba and the forty thieves. I recomend it as a nightly read for small children during story time, with a small warning for mature content.

I was looking for an authentic original telling of the tales of a thousand nights and one night. This is the best I've found so far. I bought it for research purposes, but found it very enjoyable at the same time.

A hauntingly beautiful book; I fell in love with the wild, strange, exotic prose style. To the reader who was bored at having to look up so many words, I recommend _See Spot Run_.

Burton weaves an entire world, dazzling in its splendor and detail if arguably ethnocentric, e.g., in its depiction of working-class Arabs as thieves, liars, schemers, and plotters--who, in some cases, beat their own mothers until gently "corrected" by the sultan's bastinado. I agree with many of my fellow reviewers that Burton's English can present difficulties--in some cases, exceptional difficulties--though those who can read the King James Bible of 1611 should have no difficulty with Burton's Victorian vocabulary and sentence structures. (To be quite honest, the lack of a single paragraph break is more troubling--foreboding, even, at first sight--than the choice of vocabulary. Just be warned that words that you think you know you really don't know, unless you consider the underlying Greek or Latin roots. For example, "prevent" means "come before," which--while counterintuitive to the modern reader--makes perfect sense insofar as 'pre-' is Latin for 'before' and 'venire' is Latin for 'come'.) Prepare to be seduced, astonished, and bewildered by the fantastic magic of the world that Burton offers us--noting, albeit, that his world is a melange of cultural elements culled from the Arabian peninsula, Iran, India, Turkey, even Morocco--and be admonished that there is plenty of detailed erotic content (sometimes bowdlerized as "they fell to a-dallying with one another" or some such) that is best kept from younger children. Admittedly, the collection of footnotes at the end--and the continual restarting of numbering from tale to tale--can present a hindrance, but this should not present a problem, as the footnotes seldom deal with the actual flow of the story, instead offering obscure (even pedantic) historical or linguistic minutiae. Lastly, as a cultural backdrop against which to evaluate and ponder these stories, consider that the Middle East of Burton's collection represented the erstwhile summit of man's achievements: while illiterate Europeans were slaving away as landed noblemen's serfs, living in rude wooden huts, and fleeing like frightened rats from hordes of invading Mongols or bands of merciless Viking raiders, ninth-century Middle Easterners lived in splendid cities; enjoyed written fluency in their native languages; exercised religious freedom; and engaged in bold, productive research in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and pharmacy at the sultan's behest and sponsorship.

This is not the Complete Arabian Nights, some nights are missing, I bought this E-Book for a particular night- "Ma'aruf The Cobbler And His Wife Fatimah", but it was not there.

I think it's better to buy the Paperback edition to get all 1001 nights, or what we Arabs call it "Alf Laila wa Laila".