The Arabian Nights (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

The Arabian Nights, known as Alf Layla wa Layla in Arabic, although one of the most famous and influential works in English literature, was never regarded by Arabic scholars as a work of literary worth. The tenth-century historian Ali Aboulhusn el Mesoudi, as cited by Joseph Campbell in his introduction to The Portable Arabian Nights, condemned the stories, saying "I have seen the complete work more than once, and it is indeed a vulgar, insipid book." The tales were regarded as lowbrow literature both for their frank and comedic dealings with sexuality and for their form; they were not intricately composed works of literary craftsmanship, but stories passed down orally through the generations; in other words, they were folktales. They were considered vulgar especially in comparison to what was considered high literature in medieval Arabic culture: the adab and the maqama, both of which were highly stylized forms of composition.

Despite their disfavor in the eyes of the Arabian literary establishment, when the Arabian Nights was first introduced to Europe in the early 1700s in a French translation by Antoine Galland, the stories were met with instant enthusiasm, not only for their highly entertaining subject matter but for their use as a window into the otherwise mysterious Islamic world.

The tales were cited by many writers over the centuries as having a profound influence: A. S. Byatt, in her introduction to the Modern Library edition of Burton's translation, states that for the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth century, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, "the Arabian Nights stood for the wonderful against the mundane, the imaginative against the prosaically and reductively rational." Edgar Allan Poe went so far as to try to write the story that might follow the one-thousand-and-one tales, and the tales influenced the works of twentieth-century writers such as Salman Rushdie and Jorge Luis Borges.

The English translations of the stories that predated Burton's censored the more sexually graphic parts that exist in the original Arabian Nights, either by glossing them or leaving them out altogether. Burton's translation, however, left none of the sexual content out; it even included copious notes annotating the sexual practices of the Arabic culture. This extreme focus on sexuality shocked the Victorian establishment; in fact, there was an immediate call for censoring the work.

The clamor for censorship, however, engendered spirited defense of the work and discussion of Victorian hypocrisy. Byatt's "Introduction" includes the following quotation from John Addington Symonds: "When we invite our youth to read an unexpurgated Bible an unexpurgated collection of Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare it is surely inconsistent to exclude the unexpurgated Arabian Nights, from the studies of a nation who rule India and administer Egypt."

Criticism of Burton's translation was not limited to the explicit content, however. Many critics took issue with his ornate style and use of archaic language, with which he attempted to imitate the cadence of the original medieval Arabic.

Symonds offered this criticism in his same defense: "Commanding a vast and miscellaneous vocabulary, [Burton] takes such pleasure in the use of it that sometimes he transgresses the unwritten laws of artistic harmony." Byatt included an excerpt from an 1890 review in The Nation that also sharply criticized Burton's overwrought style, calling it "unreadable for its own sake," declaring his annotations "a perpetual menace" and his archaisms and phrasings "barbarisms," and concluding that "the book was a flat failure." However, Burton's translation received a great reception from the general reading public; the first printing of one thousand sold out, turning Burton his very first profit as a writer.