The Librivox readers are working through Richard Burton’s The Book of A Thousand Nights and a Night, aka ‘The Arabian Nights’, as audiobook readings and have just released volume 9. Which makes it almost complete, with just Vol. 10 to go. Presumably once Vol. 10 is done the team will then go on to do the six volume Supplemental Nights and other related material from Burton. There are sixteen volumes in total.
The free Librivox audio is per-story, but the raw title usually gives one no indication of the contents. For instance, “Forty-second Night”. One needs to look up the story title at The Thousand Nights and a Night at wollamshram.ca. There, for instance, one can see that the story for Night 908 would be “The Spider and the Wind”, and the other titles at wollamshram.ca are similarly descriptive.
The Arabian Nights was of course a formative influence on the boy Lovecraft. However the Burton edition was unlikely to have been the edition Lovecraft knew, though it is possible that the first nine volumes of the edition were available to his elders in Providence, and that he may have peeked into ‘forbidden’ copies of Burton later in the bookshops and libraries of New York City. S.T. Joshi comments on the matter in I Am Providence…
The copy found in his library [Andrew Lang 1898 … could not have been read] at the age of five. … Sir Richard Burton’s landmark translation in sixteen volumes in 1885–86. Lovecraft certainly did not read this translation, either, as it is entirely unexpurgated and reveals, as few previous translations did, just how bawdy the Arabian Nights actually are. … My guess is that Lovecraft read one of the following three translations:
The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments: Six Stories. Edited by Samuel Eliot; translated by Jonathan Scott. Authorized for use in the Boston Public Schools. Boston: Lee & Shepard; New York: C. T. Dillington, 1880.
The Thousand and One Nights; or, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Chicago & New York: Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1885.
The Arabian Nights. Edited by Everett H. Hale; [translated by Edward William Lane]. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1888.
I also spotted The thousand and one nights, or, The Arabian nights entertainments: translated and arranged for family readings, with explanatory notes on Hathi, in its 2nd edition, 1847. “Illustrated with six hundred woodcuts by Harvey and illuminated titles by Owen Jones.” That sounds like the sort of thing that might have been in a Providence drawing room circa 1895, and accessible to young children. One wonders if this might have been the book of the same title that Joshi refers to as being “Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1885”, with Bedford being a later reprinting?
I doubt that HPL ever came across the Burton translation — except just maybe in some really big institutional library. Only 1000 copies were printed, and it was sold only to subscribers in order to get around the Victorian vice laws. And in order to subscribe, you had to have heard about it.
Burtoniana has beautiful PDF scans of the entire set, at http://burtoniana.org/books/1885-Arabian%20Nights/index.htm
(Burton was the second cousin of Lord Dunsany’s maternal grandfather, by the way.)
Thanks Martin. I did wonder if Loveman, being deep in the New York bookshop trade and also with a strong interest in two angles on the topic (weird stories and gay culture) might have encountered and perused a copy at some point.