Arabian Nights
The Arabian Nights is your magic carpet ride to exotic lands full of wonders and marvels. First collected nearly a thousand years ago, these folktales are presented as stories that crafty Scheherazade tells her husband, King Shahryar, over a thousand-and-one consecutive nights, to pique his interest for the next evening's entertainment and thereby save her life. Among them are some of the best-known legends of eastern storytelling, including the "Sinbad the Sailor," "Aladdin and His Magic Lamp," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." This collection features more than twenty stories, in the classic translation of Sir Richard Burton, published between 1884 and 1886, and full-colour illustrations by Renata Fucikova and Jindra Capek.
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- The first story in Exhalation is written in the style of the Arabian Nights (Thousand and One Nights). Get the unabridged, original translation by Richard Burton - it is some of the most beautiful literature ever written - comes in 16 volumes so there will be no shortage of reading material!
- I'd recommend the travel writing of Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, spy, scholar, and all-around erudite Victorian badass.[1]
Burton was famous for being the first non-muslim to see Mecca and Medina (which he did in disguise), when the penalty for non-mulsims entering the holy cities was death. He did the same in other dangerous places as well, taking similar risks. Burton also wrote a famous translation of the Thousand and One Nights (aka Arabian Nights)[2], translated the Kama Sutra and other works.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton
[2] - Burton's is by far my favorite translation of the Thousand and One Nights. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg.[3]
- This site is amazing! Thank you!
For those who loved the Andrew Lang rainbow-color fairy tale books, Lang also published a volume of The Arabian Nights, not a translation but a recounting of selected tales. I encountered the Richard Burton commodious 3-volume set as a child. It's amazing that nobody at the time thought to proctor my reading choice, given the racism, misogyny, salaciousness, naughty illustrations, everything delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone and just laid out there. To read it cover-to-cover is actually not terribly fun. There's lots of little folk tale snippets, fables, poetry, and Burton footnoted the hell out of everything.
- See, for example, the troubles the noted explorer and translator Sir Richard Burton had. His translations of the Kama Sutra and 1001 Arabian Nights were considered scandalous in Victorian England.
He was an undaunted explorer and traveled widely and spoke 29 languages. He wrote extensively, but sadly his widow considered some of his papers too explicit to be published after his death and instead destroyed them.
His search for the headwaters of the Nile are the basis for the film Mountains of the Moon . See [1].
[1] Historical Badass: Explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton
- Nice post on an interesting time: The world lost its value; life lost its meaning; the individual no longer had grounds to reason about right and wrong. Those who articulated this dissatisfaction were the early Romantics, and they ushered in a new artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. In the process they created several iconic anti-roles that we still recognize in popular culture.
Byronic hero: the wanderer, the outcast, the Wandering Jew, the mysterious criminal whose crime is never explained.
The Visionary: the first stage of recovery and the first positive Romantic anti-role. The word often used at the time was “mystic.” The Visionary tries to observe the world so intensely as to get to the essence outside of all mental categories. It was felt to be the special task and privilege of the artist and poet to communicate that experience.
The Bohemian: perhaps the most modern of the anti-roles, characterized by a fascination with alcohol and drugs and sexual experimentation as ways to shift and change consciousness, put the mind through permutations of perceptions which are impossible for the square who is boxed in by his social role. Similar is the interest in non-bourgeouis modes of living, in indifference to middle-class standards of dress, furnishing, and cleanliness.
The Virtuoso: The Visionary avoided role-playing; the Bohemian defied it; the Virtuoso and Dandy transcended it, the one by fantastic mastery, the other by irony. Paganini was the first great Virtuoso and for decades the anti-role model and ideal. Other examples are Richard Burton the Virtuoso traveler and translator of the Arabian Nights, and the Virtuoso mountain climber who performs sublime feats of superhuman effort “because it was there.”
The Dandy: transforms the role not by excess but by irony. The role of the highest status in European society is that of the aristocratic gentleman of leisure. By willfully playing this role better than those born and trained to it, the Dandy reveals the pointlessness of the socially adapted. The social type with the highest status spends his life in play and pettiness. The Dandy instead offers perfection and elegance without content, without social function. By stealing the clothes of society, he reveals its nakedness. He demands a greater exquisiteness and perfection than society can achieve. This explains the irritation of society with the Dandy, its efforts to deprive him of his ironic authority, the moral nastiness with which England relished the downfall of Oscar Wilde.
Do any of these not evoke the hacker?
