Richard Burton (1) (1821–1890)

Eu sei que há todo aquele papo de se inserir na época em que o livro foi escrito, e eu tentei, de verdade, mas o fato de ser impossível entrar totalmente em branco dentro de qualquer coisa só acrescenta aos pontos negativos que esse livro tem para mim. Eu aguentei algumas dezenas de — repetitivas — noites, antes de largar mão do livro e pular para as histórias mais bem faladas, ''Sinbad, ''Aladinn'' e ''Ali Baba'', histórias realmente interessantes, mas pelo que descobri, foram adições posteriores à obra original, ou seja, as melhores narrativas do livro nem faziam parte dele de fato. Você entra esperando gênios concedendo desejos, e recebe gênios estuprando mulheres.

Eu entendo que foi um livro importante, e para mim, no entanto, vai ser apenas isso, um livro que sei ser importante e nada mais; gostei mais da Epopéia de Gilgamesh do que as Mil e uma Noites.

Muitos dos meus autores favoritos sempre recomendam esse livro, mas, sei lá, muito impalpável para mim. Fico me perguntando até se li a versão certa, dada a chuva de cinco estrelas que esse livro recebe por aqui. Um dia eu tento de novo. Talvez o caminho seja ler os contos espaçados e não em sequência, dada a grande repetição de temas. Talvez o caminho seja outra edição. Sinceramente não sei.… (más)

Last year I decided to take on The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales and was really disappointed. But, I decided not to let this keep me from giving Arabian Nights a try. And it turns out, it was a good decision.What struck me most was just how much family was the focus of these tales. Time and time again a family member was separated from their family and time and time again all family members did all they could to achieve a reunion. On the negative side. Just about every tale dealt with greed, which is what often caused these separations. But all in all, a very interesting look into a foreign culture, we need to work harder at understanding.… (más)

The Arabian Nights, also familiar in the West as One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales whose origins reach back more than a thousand years. The tales begin with a king, Shahryar, who discovers his wife's infidelity, and he vows to marry a new woman each night but have her killed the next morning to eliminate the possibility of being betrayed again. This goes on for some time (the carnage is certainly piling up) when Shahrazad, daughter of his right-hand man and who has a few tricks up her sleeve, offers herself as his next bride. Her cunning strategy is to tell a folktale each night with the suggestion of more to come, leaving Shahryar so curious about what happens next in the narrative that he will allow her to live another night in order to find out. What follows make up what has been a rich Middle Eastern oral and literary tradition that includes, among many others, such well-known tales as Sindbad the Seaman, Alaeddin, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

The translation I read was Burton's 1889 edition, which was written in archaic language such as "thee," "thou," "quoth" and "doest," and abounded with unfamiliar vocabulary like "wot," "haply," "gugglet," "rede" and "weet." Including notes, it is 872 very dense pages (virtually no paragraph breaks) and to digest more than 10-15 pages in a sitting was a challenge in focus. For that reason I used it to fulfill the Read Harder 2021 category 'a book you've been intimidated to read.' Modern readers may find the sheer amount of racism, misogyny, incest, slavery, murder and other disturbingly cruel violence, theft and backstabbing in these stories uncomfortable. There is also much tearing of clothes and heaving of dust onto one's head, which I surmise is how grief is depicted, as well as truly endless numbers of shipwrecks (Sindbad was a glutton for punishment in a most baffling way). It should be noted that a remarkable number of times it is women and their cooler heads who save the day! I feel something of an accomplishment to have finally, successfully made my way through this book, so I'm feeling pretty triumphant about that, as well as pleased to know a little more about this legendary icon of world literature.… (más)

I wanted to like this one more than I did. The Victorian explorer Richard Burton was a man of multitudes, and To the Holy Shrines, an abridged account of his dangerous undercover expedition to Mecca (which was forbidden, on pain of death, to infidels), was a feat I'd always been interested in. Burton can write, even if it is in that verbose Victorian style which is difficult to parse for a modern reader, but the problem is that this selection – part of Penguin's 'Great Journeys' series – doesn't give us the whole story. It contains routine (though exotic) travelogue information and ends just as an undercover Burton first sights the holy city. We're denied the best part, and ultimately To the Holy Shrines is too short and the selection too scattergun for Burton's personality and writing approach to settle favourably in the reader's mind.… (más)