Part 29 (1/2)

Uneath to him to smell, who's To catarrh-troubled men flowers troubled with a rheum, Are lack their smell; flowers; the broker knows And brokers ken for how much what worth the garments be. clothes can sell;

So supplicate thy Lord right So haste and with thy Lord humbly for His grace And re-union sue, Providence, belike, shall And haply fate shall lend thee help thy constancy; aidance due.

And thou shalt win thy will and Rest from rejection and from estrangement's stress estrangement stress, And eke rejection's pains And joy thy wish and will shall shall be at rest and free. choicely bless.

The asylum of His grace is wide His court wide open for the enough for all That seek; The suer is dight:-- one true G.o.d, the One, very G.o.d, the Lord, th'

Conqueror, is He! Almighty might.

We may also compare the two renderings of that exquisite and tender little poem ”Azizeh's Tomb” [462] which will be found in the ”Tale of Aziz and Azizeh.”

Payne Burton

I pa.s.sed by a ruined tomb in the I past by a broken tomb amid midst of a garden way, Upon a garth right sheen, Whereon whose letterless stone seven on seven blooms of Nu'aman blood-red anemones lay. glowed with cramoisie.

”Who sleeps in this unmarked Quoth I, ”Who sleepeth in this grave?” I said, and the tomb?” Quoth answering earth, ”Bend low; For a earth, ”Before a lover lover lies here and waits for Hades-tombed bend reverently.”

the Resurrection Day.”

”G.o.d keep thee, O victim of Quoth I, ”May Allah help thee, love!” I cried, ”and bring O thou slain of love, And thee to dwell In the highest grant thee home in heaven of all the heavens of Paradise, and Paradise-height to see!

I pray!

”How wretched are lovers all, ”Hapless are lovers all e'en even in the sepulchre, tombed in their tombs, For their very tombs are Where amid living folk the covered with ruin and decay! dust weighs heavily!

”Lo! if I might, I would plant ”Fain would I plant a garden thee a garden round about, blooming round thy grave and with my streaming tears And water every flower with the thirst of its flowers tear-drops flowing allay!” free!” [463]

136. The Summing Up.

The reader will notice from these citations:

(1) That, as we have already said, and as Burton himself partly admitted, Burton's translation is largely a paraphrase of Payne's. This is particularly noticeable in the latter half of the Nights. He takes hundreds--nay thousands--of sentences and phrases from Payne, often without altering a single word. [464] If it be urged that Burton was quite capable of translating the Nights without drawing upon the work of another, we must say that we deeply regret that he allowed the opportunity to pa.s.s, for he had a certain rugged strength of style, as the best pa.s.sages in his Mecca and other books show. In order to ensure originality he ought to have translated every sentence before looking to see how Payne put it, but the temptation was too great for a very busy man--a man with a hundred irons in the fire--and he fell. [465]

(2) That, where there are differences, Payne's translation is invariably the clearer, finer and more stately of the two. Payne is concise, Burton diffuse. [466]

(3) That although Burton is occasionally happy and makes a pat couplet, like the one beginning ”Kisras and Caesars,” nevertheless Payne alone writes poetry, Burton's verse being quite unworthy of so honourable a name. Not being, like Payne, a poet and a lord of language; and, as he admits, in his notes, not being an initiate in the methods of Arabic Prosody, Burton s.h.i.+rked the isometrical rendering of the verse.

Consequently we find him constantly annexing Payne's poetry bodily, sometimes with acknowledgement, oftener without. Thus in Night 867 he takes half a page. Not only does he fail to reproduce agreeably the poetry of the Nights, but he shows himself incapable of properly appreciating it. Notice, for example, his remark on the lovely poem of the Fakir at the end of the story of ”Abu Al-Hasan and Abu Ja'afer the Leper,” the two versions of which we gave on a preceding page. Burton calls it ”sad doggerel,” and, as he translates it, so it is. But Payne's version, with its musical subtleties and choice phrases, such as ”The thought of G.o.d to him his very housemate is,” is a delight to the ear and an enchantment of the sense. Mr. Payne in his Terminal Essay singles out the original as one of the finest pieces of devotional verse in the Nights; and worthy of Vaughan or Christina Rossetti. The gigantic nature of Payne's achievement will be realised when we mention that The Arabian Nights contains the equivalent of some twenty thousand decasyllabic lines of poetry, that is to say more than there are in Milton's Paradise Lost, and that he has rendered faithfully the whole of this enormous ma.s.s in accordance with the intricate metrical scheme of the original, and in felicitous and beautiful language.

(4) That Burton, who was well read in the old English poets, also introduces beautiful words. This habit, however, is more noticeable in other pa.s.sages where we come upon cilice, [467] egromancy, [468]

verdurous, [469] vergier, [470] rondure, [471] purfled, [472] &c. Often he uses these words with excellent effect, as, for example, ”egromancy,”

[473] in the sentence: ”Nor will the egromancy be dispelled till he fall from the horse;” but unfortunately he is picturesque at all costs. Thus he constantly puts ”purfled” where he means ”embroidered” or ”sown,” and in the ”Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,” he uses incorrectly the pretty word ”cucurbit” [474] to express a bra.s.s pot; and many other instances might be quoted. His lapses, indeed, indicate that he had no real sense of the value of words. He uses them because they are pretty, forgetting that no word is attractive except in its proper place, just as colours in painting owe their value to their place in the general colour scheme. He took most of his beautiful words from our old writers, and a few like ensorcelled [475] from previous translators.

Unfortunately, too, he spoils his version by the introduction of antique words that are ugly, uncouth, indigestible and yet useless. What, for example, does the modern Englishman make of this, taken from the ”Tale of the Wolf and the Fox,” ”Follow not frowardness, for the wise forbid it; and it were most manifest frowardness to leave me in this pit draining the agony of death and dight to look upon mine own doom, whereas it lieth in thy power to deliver me from my stowre?” [476] Or this: ”O rare! an but swevens [477] prove true,” from ”Kamar-al-Zalam II.” Or this ”Sore pains to gar me dree,” from ”The Tale of King Omar,”

or scores of others that could easily be quoted. [478]

Burton, alas! was also unscrupulous enough to include one tale which, he admitted to Mr. Kirby, does not appear in any redaction of the Nights, namely that about the misfortune that happened to Abu Ha.s.san on his Wedding day. [479] ”But,” he added, ”it is too good to be omitted.” Of course the tale does not appear in Payne. To the treatment meted by each translator to the coa.r.s.enesses of the Nights we have already referred.