From Introduction to Haddawy’s translation of Arabian
Nights:
[Lane] omits the details of the drinking scene in “The
Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” because he has
never seen Cairene ladies drink, but, to make sure that
the reader is properly informed, he appends a twentypage footnote dealing with drinking habits among the
Arabs. Then he goes on to explain that such passages, like
the one he has omitted, “seem as if they were introduced
for the gratification of the lowest class of auditors of a
public reciter of a coffee-shop.” (ch. 10, n. 87). He also
omits the verse passages, except for a token line here and
there, because he finds them to be for the most part either
worthless or obscure, and because in truth they do not
suit his sociological purpose. He is an orientalist or a
sociologist, rather than a storyteller.
If Lane attempts to guide the prudish Victorian reader
through Cairo by intro- ducing him to a higher class of
Egyptian society, Burton attempts to bring Cairo,
in all its color, to England. But unlike Lane, who is
interested in what he considers to be typical
manifestations of Arab culture, Burton is interested in
the exotic, the quaint, and the colorful. He too
appends copious notes, but these are meant to appeal
to Victorian prurience or to shock prudish sensibility.
Typical is the note on the passage in the “Prologue,” in
which Shahrayar’s wife lies on her back and invites the
black slave Mas’ud to make love to her while ten other
black slaves are busy making love to ten of her female
attendants; Burton explains the white wom- an’s
predilection for black men by expatiating on the efficacy
of the enormous male organs in Zanzibar, promising the
reader to regale him on the retention of the se- men, in
due course. Burton declares in the introduction that his
purpose is to produce a “full, com- plete, unvarnished,
uncastrated copy of the great original.”
[On his own strategy]:Translation is
the transfer of a text from one cultural
context to another by converting its language
in- to the language of the host culture. This
requires command of the languages involved and of the
literary idioms and conventions of both cultures. In
converting the meaning of the text, the translators, who
must act both as editors and as interpreters, offer a
reading of it, designed for a given reader in a given
language, and in the context of a given culture. They try
to achieve equivalency, but since, due to the
untranslatable difference in cultural connotations,
associations, and other nuances, full equivalency is
impossible, the translators try to achieve
approximation by securing a willing suspension of
disbelief that allows the reader to believe that the
translated text is the original text…the translators must
convey not only the meaning of the text but also its
aesthetic effect on readers. They respond to the text as
natives would, by identifying the means by which this
effect is produced, and by finding the comparable
linguistic and literary means available in the host culture
to produce a comparable effect in the intended
reader…For the aesthetic effect, which is grounded in
human nature and which can be achieved by our
knowledge of and skill in using the tools of the respective
literary conventions, is the common denominator
between the native and the host culture and the principal
means of success in transferring the literary work from
one context to another.