The Arabian Nights

To my chagrin, after a few months of daily annotation and study of Burton's writings, i realized that the version i'm using begotten online is actually the popular yet abridged version and there exists a unexpurgated version.

Here's a quote from The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition (1974-1997), on Sir Richard Burton:

He also published openly, but privately, an unexpurgated 16-volume edition of the Arabian Nights (1885-88), the translation of which was so exceptional for its fidelity, masculine vigour, and literary skill that it has frightened away all competitors. Moreover, he larded these volumes with ethnological footnotes and daring essays on pornography, homosexuality, and the sexual education of women. He railed against the “immodest modesty,” the cant, and hypocrisy of his era, displaying psychological insights that anticipated both Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. His Nights were praised by some by for their robustness and honesty but attacked by others as “garbage of the brothels,” “an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice.”

The unexpurgated version is huge, in 16 volumes, and each volume includes a preface and a dedication, and with several pages of annotations. To read them all and understand them all is pretty much equivalent to a year of study of Middle East and Islamic culture. Yours truely can't be making such undertaking. The text you see on this site are the ones i read and annotated before discovery of the full version. In the coming months, i will read and add tales from the unexpurgated version, with inclusions of some if not all Burton's original annotations. The outlook is that any content involving sex or offensive to Christians or otherwise moral persons will be absolutely included, while, some esoteric stuff related to study of Islam and does not contribute to the story or of interest to modern readers will be excluded.

The complete 16 volumes of unexpurgated version can be found at: http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_1/vol1.htm .

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