Part 35 (1/2)
The most complete text of The Scented Garden is that now preserved in the library at Algiers, and there are also ma.n.u.scripts in the libraries of Paris, Gotha and Copenhagen. In 1850 a ma.n.u.script which seems to have corresponded practically with The Torch of the World was translated into French by a Staff Officer of the French Army in Algeria, and an edition of thirty-five copies was printed by an autographic process in Algiers in the year 1876. [581] In 1886 an edition of 220 copies was issued by the French publisher Isidore Liseux, and the same year appeared a translation of Liseux's work bearing the imprint of the Kama Shastra Society. This is the book that Burton calls ”my old version,” [582]
which, of course, proves that he had some share in it. [583]
There is no doubt that the average Englishman [584] would be both amazed and shocked on first opening even the Kama Shastra Society's version; unless, perchance, he had been prepared by reading Burton's Arabian Nights or the Fiftieth Chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall with the Latin Notes, though even these give but a feeble idea of the fles.h.i.+ness of The Scented Garden. Indeed, as Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus, referring to the Arabs, says: ”Incredible est quo ardore apud eos in venerem uterque solvitur s.e.xus.”
160. Contents of The Scented Garden.
Nafzawi divided his book into twenty one-chapters ”in order to make it easier reading for the taleb (student).” It consists of descriptions of ”Praiseworthy Men” and ”Praiseworthy Women” from a Nafzawin point of view, interpretations of dreams, medical recipes for impotence, &c., lists of aphrodisiacs, and stories confirmatory of Ammia.n.u.s's remark.
Among the longer tales are those of Moseilma, ”Bahloul [585] and Hamdonna,” and ”The Negro Al Dhurgham” [586]--all furiously Fescinnine.
The story of Moseilema, Lord of Yamama, is familiar in one form or another to most students of Arab History. Was.h.i.+ngton Irving epitomises it in his inexpressibly beautiful ”Successors” of Mahomet [587] and Gibbon [588] tells it more fully, partly in his text and partly in his Latin footnotes. Moseilema was, no doubt, for some years quite as influential a prophet as his rival Mohammed. He may even have been as good a man, [589] but Nafzawi--staunch Mohammedan--will not let ”the Whig dogs have the best of the argument.” He charges Moseilema with having perverted sundry chapters in the Koran by his lies and impostures, and declares that he did worse than fail when he attempted to imitate Mohammed's miracles. ”Now Moseilema (whom may Allah curse!), when he put his luckless hand on the head of some one who had not much hair, the man was at once quite bald... and when he laid his hand upon the head of an infant, saying, 'Live a hundred years,' the infant died within an hour.” As a matter of fact, however, Moseilema was one of the most romantic figures in Arabic history. [590] Sedja, Queen and Prophetess, went to see him in much the same spirit that the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon. Moseilema, who outlived Mohammed about a year, was defeated and slain near his capital Yamama, by the Mohammedan hero Khalid, and Sedjah subsequently embraced Islamism.
In the tale ent.i.tled ”Djoaidi and Fadehat el Djemal” [591] appears that h.o.a.ry poet, philosopher and reprobate, Abu Nowas [592] of The Arabian Nights. Like the Nights, The Scented Garden has a cycle of tales ill.u.s.trative of the cunning and malice of women. But all the women in those days and countries were not bad, just as all were not plain.
Plumpness seems to have been the princ.i.p.al attraction of s.e.x, and the Kama Shastra version goes so far as to a.s.sure us that a woman who had a double chin, [593] was irresistible. If so, there were probably no words in the language good enough to describe a woman with three chins.
According, however, to the author of the recent Paris translation [594]
this particular rendering is a mistake. He considers that the idea Nafzawi wished to convey was the tower-like form of the neck, [595] but in any circ.u.mstances the denizens of The Scented Garden placed plumpness in the forefront of the virtues; which proves, of course, the negroid origin of at any rate some of the stories, [596] for a true Arab values slenderness. Over and over again in the Nights we are told of some seductive lady that she was straight and tall with a shape like the letter Alif or a willow wand. The perfect woman, according to Mafzawi, perfumes herself with scents, uses ithmid [597] (antimony) for her toilet, and cleans her teeth with bark of the walnut tree. There are chapters on sterility, long lists of the kind to be found in Rabelais, and solemn warnings against excess, chiefly on account of its resulting in weakness of sight, with other ”observations useful for men and women.”
While chapters i. to xx. concern almost entirely the relations between the opposite s.e.xes, Chapter xxi. [598] which const.i.tutes more than one-half of the book, treats largely of those unspeakable vices which as St. Paul and St. Jude show, and the pages of Petronius and other ancient authors prove, were so common in the pagan world, and which, as Burton and other travellers inform us, are still practised in the East.
”The style and language in which the Perfumed Garden is written are,”
says the writer of the Foreword to the Paris edition of 1904, ”of the simplest and most unpretentious kind, rising occasionally to a very high degree of eloquence, resembling, to some extent, that of the famous Thousand Nights and a Night; but, while the latter abounds in Egyptian colloquialisms, the former frequently causes the translator to pause owing to the recurrence of North African idioms and the occasional use of Berber or Kabyle words, not generally known.” In short, the literary merits or the work are trifling.
Although Nafzawi wrote his extended Scented Garden for scholars only, he seems afterwards to have become alarmed, and to have gone in fear lest it might get into the hands of the ignorant and do harm. So he ended it with:
”O you who read this, and think of the author And do not exempt him from blame, If you spare your good opinion of him, do not At least fail to say 'Lord forgive us and him.'” [599]
161. Sir Richard Burton's Translation.
It was in the autumn of 1888, as we have seen, that Sir Richard Burton, who considered the book to take, from a linguistic and ethnological point of view, a very high rank, conceived the idea of making a new translation, to be furnished with annotations of a most elaborate nature. He called it at first, with his fondness for rhyming jingle, The Scented Garden-Site for Heart's Delight, and finally decided upon The Scented Garden--Man's Heart to Gladden. Sir Richard's Translation was from the Algiers ma.n.u.script, a copy of which was made for him at a cost of eighty pounds, by M. O. Houdas, Professor at the Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes. This was of the first twenty chapters. Whether a copy of the 21st Chapter ever reached Sir Richard we have not been able to ascertain. On 31st March 1890, he wrote in his Journal: ”Began, or rather resumed, Scented Garden,” [600] and thenceforward he worked at it sedulously. Now and again the Berber or Kabyle words with which the ma.n.u.script was sprinkled gave him trouble, and from time to time he submitted his difficulties to M. f.a.gnan, ”the erudite compiler of the Catalogue of Arabic books and MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale d'Alger” and other Algerian correspondents. Lady Burton describes her husband's work as ”a translation from Arabic ma.n.u.scripts very difficult to get in the original” with ”copious notes and explanations” of Burton's own--the result, indeed, of a lifetime of research. ”The first two chapters were a raw translation of the works of Numa Numantius [601]
without any annotations at all, or comments of any kind on Richard's part, and twenty chapters, translations of Shaykh el Nafzawi from Arabic. In fact, it was all translation, except the annotations on the Arabic work.” [602] Thus Burton really translated only Chapters i. to xx., or one-half of the work. But it is evident from his remarks on the last day of his life that he considered the work finished with the exception of the pumice-polis.h.i.+ng; and from this, one judges that he was never able to obtain a copy of the 21st Chapter. Lady Burton's statement and this a.s.sumption are corroborated by a conversation which the writer had with Mr. John Payne in the autumn of 1904. ”Burton,” said Mr. Payne, ”told me again and again that in his eyes the unpardonable defect of the Arabic text of The Scented Garden was that it altogether omitted the subject upon which he had for some years bestowed special study.” If Burton had been acquainted with the Arabic text of the 21st Chapter he, of course, would not have made that complaint; still, as his letters show, he was aware that such a ma.n.u.script existed. Having complained to Mr. Payne in the way referred to respecting the contents of The Scented Garden, Burton continued, ”Consequently, I have applied myself to remedy this defect by collecting all manner of tales and of learned material of Arab origin bearing on my special study, and I have been so successful that I have thus trebled the original ma.n.u.script.” Thus, as in the case of The Arabian Nights, the annotations were to have no particular connection with the text. Quite two-thirds of these notes consisted of matter of this sort.
Mr. Payne protested again and again against the whole scheme, and on the score that Burton had given the world quite enough of this kind of information in the Nights. But the latter could not see with his friend.
He insisted on the enormous anthropological and historical importance of these notes--and that the world would be the loser were he to withold them; in fact, his whole mind was absorbed in the subject.