Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights and the Orientalist project

¶ … Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights (TAN) backed by a deep knowledge of Islam contributes to the Orientalist project and to the past and present knowledge of the Orient as it has been shaped by different disciplines such as anthropology, history and literature. It will trace the evolution of The Arabian Nights and its translation by Burton followed by an analysis applied to the representations of Oriental elements as revealed in its social and religious practices. I will argue that the stereotypes in TAN as well as the annotations that refer to Arabic-Islamic culture are related directly to Burton's intellectual vision, a vision of a British empire that takes pride in having the highest number of Muslim subjects bowed under its supremacy.

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Background

Long before the invention of the internet, the world relied upon literature to gain knowledge about other cultures. As such, the writings of novelists, poets, journalists, and research writers holding often limited experiences, together with their own personal views on culture, politics, and religion, have long served as the basis for shaping many reader's ideas about foreign cultures and traditions. The reader's understanding is thus impacted by the author's writings, leaving the reader with a potentially misguided understanding of the other cultures that stands in contradiction to the real life, traditions, and the culture of the society the author wrote about. The seeds of Orientalism were planted in the minds of the nineteenth century readers and developed into a vast and coherent body of knowledge most of which persistently strove to degrade and dehumanize the Orient for the sole purpose of controlling it. In his book on the subject, Orientalism (1979), Edward W. Said defines Orientalism in the following terms:

By Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient -- and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist -- either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientialist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. (Said 6)

In sum, Said's Orientalism is an analysis of the field of Oriental Studies that has been an important academic field of study in many leading European universities for hundreds of years. In this regard, Windschuttle reports that, "Oriental Studies is a composite area of scholarship comprising philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts" (30).

In his book, Said emphasizes that his discourse does not attempt to address the entire field of Oriental Studies, but rather concentrates on the manner in which French, British and American scholars have analyzed Arab societies in North Africa and the Middle East (Windschuttle 31). According to Windschuttle, "[Said] has nothing on the other areas that traditionally comprised the field such as Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Far Eastern cultures, nor does he discuss the attitudes of German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese Orientalists" (31). The period covered in Orientalism is primarily limited to the scholarly field that existed during the late eighteenth century to the present day, while European scholarship concerning Oriental Studies originated during the High Middle Ages (Windschuttle 31). Notwithstanding these constraints, though, Said's book does make a significant contribution to the body of knowledge concerning Oriental Studies by expanding the scope to include other cultural factors. For instance, Windschuttle notes that, "Within his time frame, however, Said extends his examination beyond the works of recognized Orientalist academics to take in literature, journalism, travel books, and religious and philosophical studies to produce a broadly historical and anthropological perspective" (31).

An important point made by Massad concerns Said's motivation for studying Orientalism and the focus of his research. In this regard, Massad notes that, "Said did not study Orientalism as a static system of ideas, rather as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced" (631). From Said's perspective, Orientalism was a dynamic phenomenon rather than a static point in history. For instance, Massad reports that, "For Said, Orientalism was always transforming. His task was to identify changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions [that] take place within Orientalism" (632).

Perhaps the most influential writer in the field of Orientalism was Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) (referred to alternatively as Burton throughout this study), as well as early nineteenth century translators of Alf LaylawaLayla, or The Arabian Nights (TAN), such as Petis de la Crois (1653-1713) with Antoine Galland (1646-1715), Edward Lane (1801-1876), and John Payne (1842-1916) who were also interested in the history, the culture and languages of the Middle East. Consequently, they became widely accepted and celebrated authorities on the Orient and Oriental culture because of their interpretations of that culture, its traditions, and especially ancient Oriental works of written fiction. They also belong to the most pronounced traditions of Orientalism that is the British and the French and are consistent with what Said helps put into a framework or context for understanding the meaning and definition of the term as it applies to the product of this knowledge, the relationship between the Orient and the Western world:

To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable Oriental "experts" and "hands," and Oriental professorate, a complex array of "Oriental" ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use -- the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. (Said 4)

In particular, Burton's translation and annotations maintain the creative imagination of the original Arabic work in elaborated French and British story telling of "wisdoms domesticated for local European use" (Said 4). In his annotations Burton makes Biblical comparisons between the Koran and the Christian Bible, and using his knowledge of Islam and the Orient he seems to want to create for his reader a contest between the two religious books with a slant in favor of Christianity. Despite being characterized as an enlightened cultural relativist by some authorities, many researchers agree that Burton was ethnocentric in the extreme and used his literary talents to invoke warped views about the Orient and its inhabitants in ways that have been influential to the present day. Given the enormous chasm that has grown between the East and West following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, these issues have assumed new importance and relevance. For instance, Kennedy and Warner report that:

Burton felt quite at ease from his perch as a cosmopolitan in dispensing judgments of relative cultural value. As a youth he had acquired and internalized tastes that famously alienated him from the conventions and fashions of England. As a literary commentator and translator he acknowledged his judgments of the relative aesthetic merit of different cultural products to be informed by his foreign cultural experiences and immersions. His judgment was informed by biases and preferences acquired abroad that inclined him in favor of and against particular cultures and national literary traditions, what one might term cosmopolitan prejudices. (70)

Would Burton have received the wide recognition of having been an expert, rather than just as a colonial administrator through his duties as an agent of the Crown? Or was it because of his translations and most notably his controversial annotations of The Arabian Nights? His creative elaborations earned him a wider audience than that which he might have reached with a drier, less sexually provocative historical dissertation. The broader audience, the audience that embraced the creative imaginative embellishments, is the public sector whose ideas were perhaps less concerned with, or even aligned with the political agenda of occupation, economics, and colonial expansion. That public sector would have proven useful to the goals of colonialism such that their ideas and understandings could be shaped in a fashion consistent with the agenda of political ideologies by carefully and cleverly implanting ideas and images in their minds through the device of fantasy literature.

Similar to the case with historical research of past literature, we are reminded that literature must be taken in the context of the historical time and place when it was written. (Allen 205-213) What was the social anthropology of Britain when Burton wrote his version of TAN in 1884? First, Britain was an Empire of colonies, and still actively colonizing vast regions in Africa and the Middle East. In 1882 Britain colonized Egypt, which would remain under British occupation until 1936. From the anthropological perspective, Peter Pels says:

Anthropologists mostly think of colonialism in three ways: as the universal, evolutionary progress of modernization; as a particular strategy or experiment in domination and exploitation; and as the unfinished business of struggle and negotiation. All these views, in both positive and negative versions, were common colonial currency. Anthropological views of colonialism commonly stressed a combination of the three. A standard conception of professionalizing colonialism between the wars was that, to avoid colonial struggle -- race conflict and indigenous revolt -- one should follow a colonial strategy based on anthropological knowledge and planning to achieve the desired evolutionary progress cheaply and without bloodshed (e.g. Malinowski 1929). (Pels 163-183)

For decades Burton's The Arabian Nights has been read by readers around the world; many having never experienced first-hand the Orient, or its people, but who hold in their minds an impression of those places and people derived from Burton's TAN. It is not only a false impression of the Arabo-Muslim culture, but as can be inferred from Burton's annotations it is a culturally biased impression, and one which portrays the Arab Muslim in ways that do not reflect the level of expertise Burton is credited with having as an expert on the Orient and Oriental culture. At best, Burton was an intellectual traveler to the Orient; at worst, a spy making observations in defense of a colonizing country. Whether or not Burton was the first or the latter might best be summed up by the Orientalist and historian Stanley Lane-Poole who commented many years later of another issue, "It is a question between documents and Sir Richard Burton's word" (Godsall 331-335).

Historically, Burton's annotations, which are his reader's contextual framework for TAN, fail to make mention of the many positive contributions Middle Eastern people have made to art, science, medicine, and technological advancements, all of which contributed to the advancement in these areas for Western culture. Rather, nineteenth century readers were subjectively influenced by Western literary interpretations of Oriental fiction which carry in them the infliction of colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and resentments of the indigenous struggle for autonomy. This mind-set can be demonstrated in a single, and perhaps the most widely read work: Captain Sir Richard F. Burton's TAN. Authors such as Petis de la Crois with Antoine Galland, and Edward William Lane, whose own translation of TAN contains fewer embellishments than Burton's, depart from the actual tales as originally told, and, therefore, distort the true meaning and images of the original tales as they reflected a more wholesome and true-to-nature Near Eastern Oriental society and culture. However Burton's relationship to England as a soldier and diplomatic representative, gives rise to the question of whether or not Burton's embellishments were used to further the political and economic agendas of his greater source of benefit and support: the English government.

Certainly Burton's relationship to the government and his interpretations of TAN warrant examination to identify what, if any, patterns and ideas of government propaganda might be found. Also, the ideas and comments of other scholars must be examined and considered in this same regard. We know that Burton read Payne's TAN book, and that it was this book that first drew Burton's attention to the old fictions. It was Payne's book that Burton is alleged (by Zipes) to have plagiarized (Zipes viii). Thus, it is important to examine Payne's work for any relevance that it might provide in discussing Burton. Already, there exists documented evidence that Burton took liberties in plagiarizing other works, and that he was not a man who readily reconciled his self to his own mistakes.

To determine if any support exists as to a propaganda agenda requires a close review of Burton's own personal history too. My dissertation will examine and analyze all of these areas: Burton's TAN was a tool of the Orientalist Project in support of Britain's political and economic agendas in occupying Oriental states and acting as master over Oriental people. The reader of my dissertation can draw his own conclusions as well as benefit from my analysis as a foundation for those conclusions.

One can begin to identify markers of Orientalism through comparison with other translations of TAN, and through the vast available resources of analytical scholarship and study of Burton's life and his writings. Taken as a whole, these insights help to identify Burton's part in the Orientalist Project, which is perhaps best defined by Said. It is that definition that shall be the working definition in this dissertation.

Literature Review

While some scholars have looked at TAN with an eye towards Burton's motives for interpreting and annotating the ancient stories, and others have written studies about his mimicry of Muslims; no one has really undertaken a study of how TAN worked on Western society as a tool of Burton, the Orientalist, and TAN as a tool of the Orientalist Project. This brief literature review is a compilation of some of the sources that further my thesis: TAN was, and continues to be, a tool of the Orientalist Project. This literature review begins the discussion of TAN as a literary work, but works cited here will support my thesis and argument in that way, and will help also to bring full circle the discussion so that I can demonstrate how Western society was impacted by TAN that caused it to be effective as a tool of the Project.