The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Full Set
Richard F. Burton
$$440.00

Ten volumes.

“A plain and literal translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, Now Entituled (sic) The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night with Introduction Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of The Nights….Printed by the Burton Ethnological Society, for Members Only.

Richard Burton was an accomplished geographer, explorer, orientalist, ethnologist, diplomat, polylinguist and author who is best known for his translation of Arabian Nights. One of the great Arabists of his day, he had long wanted to publish an unexpurgated version of the “Arabian Nights” stories. The first translations into English, notably that by Edward Lane (1840, 1859), were highly abridged. In translating the Nights, Burton “attempted to invent an English equivalent of medieval Arabic. In doing so, he drew upon Chaucerian English, Elizabethan English, and the 1653 English translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of the first three books of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (Byatt).