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 arht So haste and with thy Lord hurace 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 froement stress, And eke rejection's pains And joy thy wish and will shall shall be at rest and free choicely bless

The asyluh for all That seek; The suer is dight:-- one true God, the One, very God, the Lord, th'

Conqueror, is He! Als 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 passed by a ruined toarden way, Upon a garth right sheen, Whereon whose letterless stone seven on seven blooloith cramoisie

”Who sleeps in this unrave?” I said, and the to earth, ”Bend low; For a earth, ”Before a lover lover lies here and waits for Hades-tombed bend reverently”

the Resurrection Day”

”God keep thee, O victi O thou slain of love, And thee to dwell In the highest grant thee hoht to see!

I pray!

”Horetched are lovers all, ”Hapless are lovers all e'en even in the sepulchre, tombed in their to folk the covered with ruin and decay! dust weighs heavily!

”Lo! if I arden round about, bloo tears And water every floith the thirst of its flowers tear-drops flowing allay!” free!” [463]

136 The Su Up

The reader will notice from these citations:

(1) That, as we have already said, and as Burton hiely 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 frole word [464] If it be urged that Burton was quite capable of translating the Nights without drawing upon the work of another, we ret that he allowed the opportunity to pass, for he had a certain rugged strength of style, as the best passages 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 tereat 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”Kisras and Caesars,” nevertheless Payne alone writes poetry, Burton's verse being quite unworthy of so honourable a nae; and, as he ad an initiate in the methods of Arabic Prosody, Burton shi+rked the iso of the verse

Consequently we find hi Payne's poetry bodily, soht 867 he takes half a page Not only does he fail to reproduce agreeably the poetry of the Nights, but he shows hi 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 ht of God to hiht to the ear and an enchantles 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 achievehts 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 mass in accordance with the intricate inal, and in felicitous and beautiful language

(4) That Burton, ell read in the old English poets, also introduces beautiful words This habit, however, is es where we coroier, [470] rondure, [471] purfled, [472] &c Often he uses these words with excellent effect, as, for exaroromancy 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 brass pot; and ht be quoted His lapses, indeed, indicate that he had no real sense of the value of words He uses the 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 exalishman make of this, taken from the ”Tale of the Wolf and the Fox,” ”Follow not frowardness, for the wise forbid it; and it werethe 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,” froarOmar,”

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 theday [479] ”But,” he added, ”it is too good to be omitted” Of course the tale does not appear in Payne To the treatment hts we have already referred