"Volume XI" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burtons Version)

SUPPLEMENTAL NIGHTS

To The Book Of The Thousand
And One Nights With Notes
Anthropological And
Explanatory

By
Richard F. Burton

VOLUME ONE

General Studholme J. Hodgson

My Dear General,
To whom with more pleasure or propriety can I inscribe this volume than to my preceptor of past times; my dear old friend, whose deep study and vast experience of such light literature as The Nights made me so often resort to him for good counsel and right direction? Accept this little token of gratitude, and believe me, with the best of wishes and the kindest of memories,
Ever yours sincere and attached
Richard F. Burton.

London, July 15, 1886.

"To the Pure all things are Pure" (Puris omnia Pura) --Arab Proverb. "Niuna corrotta mente intese mai sanamente parole." --"Decameron" -- conclusion. "Erubuit, posuitque meum Lucretia librum Sed coram Bruto. Brute! recede, leget." --Martial. "Miculx est de ris que de larmes escripre, Pour ce qui rire est le propres des hommes." --Rabelais. "The pleasure we derive from perusing the Thousand-and-One Stories makes us regret that we possess only a comparatively small part of these truly enchanting fictions." --Crichton's "History of Arabia."
The Translator’s Foreword.



After offering my cordial thanks to friends and subscribers who have honoured “The Thousand Nights and a Night” (Kama Shastra Society) with their patronage and approbation, I would inform them that my “Anthropological Notes” are by no means exhausted, and that I can produce a complete work only by means of a somewhat extensive Supplement.  I therefore propose to print (not publish), for private circulation only, five volumes, bearing the title–


Supplemental Nights
to the book of
The Thousand Nights and a Night

This volume and its successor (Nos. i. and ii.) contain Mr. John Payne’s Tales from the Arabic; his three tomes being included in my two.  The stories are taken from the Breslau Edition where they are distributed among the volumes between Nos. iv and xii., and from the Calcutta fragment of 1814.  I can say little for the style of the story-stuff contained in this Breslau text, which has been edited with phenomenal incuriousness.  Many parts are hopelessly corrupted, whilst at present we have no means of amending the commissions and of supplying the omissions by comparison with other manuscripts.  The Arabic is not only faulty, but dry and jejune, comparing badly with that of the “Thousand Nights and a Night,” as it appears in the Macnaghten and the abridged Bulak Texts.  Sundry of the tales are futile; the majority has little to recommend it, and not a few require a diviner rather than a translator.  Yet they are valuable to students as showing the different sources and the heterogeneous materials from and of which the great Saga-book has been compounded.  Some are, moreover, striking and novel, especially parts of the series entitled King Shah Bakht and his Wazir Al-Rahwan (pp. 191-355).  Interesting also is the Tale of the “Ten Wazirs” (pp. 55-155), marking the transition of the Persian Bakhtiyбr-Nбmeh into Arabic.  In this text also and in this only is found Galland’s popular tale “Abou-Hassan; or, the Sleeper Awakened,” which I have entitled “The Sleeper and the Waker.”

In the ten volumes of “The Nights” proper, I mostly avoided parallels of folk-lore and fabliaux which, however interesting and valuable to scholars, would have over-swollen the bulk of a work especially devoted to Anthropology.  In the “Supplementals,” however, it is otherwise; and, as Mr. W.A. Clouston, the “Storiologist,” has obligingly agreed to collaborate with me, I shall pay marked attention to this subject, which will thus form another raison d’кte for the additional volumes.

Richard F. Burton

Junior Travellers’ Club,
December 1, 1886

The Sleeper and the Waker. [FN#1]




It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that there was once at Baghdad, in the Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, a man and a merchant, who had a son Abъ al-Hasan-al-Khalн’a by name. [FN#2]  The merchant died leaving great store of wealth to his heir who divided it into two equal parts, whereof he laid up one and spent of the other half; and he fell to companying with Persians [FN#3] and with the sons of the merchants and he gave himself up to good drinking and good eating, till all the wealth [FN#4] he had with him was wasted and wantoned; whereupon he betook himself to his friends and comrades and cup-companions and expounded to them his case, discovering to them the failure of that which was in his hand of wealth.  But not one of them took heed of him or even deigned answer him.  So he returned to his mother (and indeed his spirit was broken) and related to her that which had happened to him and what had befallen him from his friends, how they had neither shared with him nor required him with speech.  Quoth she, “O Abu al-Hasan, on this wise are the sons [FN#5] of this time: an thou have aught, they draw thee near to them, [FN#6] and if thou have naught, they put thee away from them.”  And she went on to condole with him, what while he bewailed himself and his tears flowed and he repeated these lines:--

“An wane my wealth, no mane will succour me, * When my wealth waxeth all men friendly show: