Group 4 (1001 Nights 3)
Jake Fernando
ENG 2850
3/28/17
There are many original texts and films that are translated by people in order to adhere to the present day audience. With this some things are going to be lost in translation while being influenced by the author ideologies, sometimes changing the story drastically. In the frame story “One Thousand and One Nights” there have been many translations by western authors. Since this story originated from the East, there are going to be many changes in order to appeal to a certain audience in the West. This is where orientalism steps in where Edward Said defines it as
“the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on …” An author that identifies as an orient who also translated many stories from “One Thousand and One Nights” is Richard Burton, and his time period and audience influenced how he writes and the ideologies he has while writing these translations.
Burton was born in 1821 in a time where not much was known about life in the East. He has a history of interacting with the East including a famously documented pilgrimage he made to the Mecca where he disguised himself as one of them along with him enlisting in the army. While in the army he was so intrigued by the culture of India that he was active in partaking in the religion and cultural values and always saw them as exotic and something to be studied. However, people did not meet or even know many people from the civilizations in the East. So they were brought to learn about the East through the eyes of the western way of life.
Burton was in a time period where he had an audience that believed the East was a poor, dirty area that had a totally different type of lifestyle. They did not know much the Eastern civilization other than generalizations drawn upon from stories and paintings, depicting them as groups of people wearing turbans crowding he streets while the women were exotic and were subject to men’s’ desires. So some generalizations and stereotypes were incorporated into stories involving the East including Burton’s translation of the “Tale of the Three Apples.”
Burton included many aspects he thought were part of Islamic life into the story, while not true it appealed to what the audience of the time expected of Eastern civilization. The irrelevancies made by Burton can be seen here:
“…this woman was my wife and the mother of my children; also my first cousin and the daughter of my paternal uncle, this old man who is my father’s own brother. When I married her she was a maid and Allah blessed me with three male children by her; she loved me and served me and I saw no evil in her,”
Another stereotype that was believed by western civilization pertaining to the East is that there was a lot of incest. He also adds an unnecessary anecdote about the young mans’ uncle which shows his integrity to show how the inner relationships work even though this might not be the case in general Islamic culture. This is even revisited in dialogue many times as the husband and wife address each other as “my cousin!” or “my uncle’s daughter!” many times for no apparent reason other than to seemingly convince the readers that this stereotype is a fact. In the original frame story, this was never mentioned in addition this text plays into the narrative that the women are subservient in this type of culture and they have to pertain to every need of their husband.
His culture at that time encouraged this type of writing in order to give people the reassurance that their way of life is the gold standard. This is where orientalism shows since this was considered the norm at that time. Burton’s translation derives on environment around him, in his case he was just a tourist in Muslim culture and then he added ideas that he brought back from his exploration, whether objective or subjective. His writing actually helped western civilization understand these stories and even though these are in fictional stories, these idea of western dominance grows in their mind eventually grows into xenophobia.