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Did Sir Richard Burton Translate Sadi's Gulistan ?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
In 1928 the publishing firm of Philip Allan and Co., of London, brought out a volume called Tales from the Gulistan or Rose Garden of the Sheikh Sadi of Shiraz, translated by Sir Eichard Burton. The identity of the editor was not apparent, the Introduction carrying only initials R. F. B. and the date 1888. When two years ago I sought to discover who the editor was, a letter from Mr. Eric Finlayson, receiver for the firm of Philip Allan and Co., defunct since 1937, explained that because of dispersal of company records during the war it was impossible to establish his identity. The information is important in determining the grounds upon which the translation was attributed to Burton.
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- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1950
References
page 185 note 1 Professor Arthur J. Arberry has conjectured, in a letter to me, that the editor might have been the late Sir E. Denison Ross.
page 186 note 1 The Life of Sir Richard Burton, 2 vols. (London, 1906), ii, 66Google Scholar.
page 186 note 2 The Life of John Payne (London, 1919), p. 74Google Scholar.
page 186 note 3 An Annotated Bibliography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London, 1923), pp. 161–2Google Scholar.
page 186 note 4 Open Court, xlii (Chicago, 1928), p. 157Google Scholar.
page 186 note 5 Wright charges Burton with a lack of self-sufficiency even in Arabic, of which he was presumably master. Wright adduces considerable proof that much of Burton's Arabian Nights is taken wholly from the earlier translation of his friend John Payne, and he points out that The Perfumed Garden was rendered from a French version and not from the Arabic. To be sure, at the time of his death Burton had completed a new translation of this work from the Arabic, and it may be that his borrowings from Payne indicate temperamental laziness rather than linguistic inability.
page 187 note 1 Persian Portraits, a Sketch of Persian History, Literature, and Politics (London, 1887), p. 56Google Scholar.
page 188 note 1 The 1928 edition reads: “The present work has been ably and faithfully translated” for the Kama Shastr&'s claim that earlier translations had “never been faithfully literal or entirely complete. Both these qualifications are offered in the present edition”.
page 188 note 2 Sir Arnold T. Wilson in the Burton Memorial Lecture at the Royal Asiatic Society in 1937 reported that Burton's library and manuscripts were now at the Central Library in High Street, Kensington, and at the Camberwell Publio Library in Peckham Road.