The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

BURTON, Richard.

Item Number: 26038

Manuscript edition with original leaf in Burton’s hand in volume one. Octavo, 16 volumes. Bound in full green leather, elaborately gilt-stamped to the spine, front and rear panels with Arabic script, raised bands. Top edges gilt and gilt turn-ins. Each volume illustrated with a double suite of frontispieces, after Albert Letchford; the second being colored. In near fine condition. The manuscript leaf is a book review by Burton, of a French translation of Johannis de Capua’s Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of the Panchatantra. An exceptional set.

Richard Burton was an accomplished geographer, explorer, orientalist, ethnologist, diplomat, polylinguist and author who is best known for his translation of Arabian Nights. One of the great Arabists of his day, he had long wanted to publish an unexpurgated version of the "Arabian Nights" stories. The first translations into English, notably that by Edward Lane (1840, 1859), were highly abridged. In translating the Nights, Burton "attempted to invent an English equivalent of medieval Arabic. In doing so, he drew upon Chaucerian English, Elizabethan English, and the 1653 English translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of the first three books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel" (Byatt).