Of course, you may say, this represents nothing more than fantasy; it's the sort of extravagant wish-fulfilment tall tales customarily exploit. As Robert Irwin notes in his brilliant The Arabian Nights: a Companion (London, 2004), it would be risky to draw conclusions about medieval Muslim sexual, or social, life from these stories. And yet, fantasies are grounded in longing. However Abbasid Baghdad or Mamluke Cairo differed from their depictions here, the stories reflect the deepest hopes and fears, as well as the most abiding aspirations, of a culture. These are as authentic as any "facts on the ground". Despite outright errors and blatant anachronisms, the stories remain faithful to a deeper truth than that of mere social history. They embody a vast repertoire of the imagination, perhaps the most intricate ever assembled.
The new Lyons version is the first complete translation into English since Richard Burton published the 10-volume A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, in 1885 (followed by his Supplemental Nights, in six volumes, in 1886-8). Burton's faults as a translator have been well documented. A disciple of "logopandocie" - which Irwin defines as a "readiness to admit words of all kinds into the language" (and best exemplified by Sir Thomas Urquhart in his gleefully deranged 1653 translation of Rabelais) - Burton positively wallowed in archaic locutions, the more outlandish the better. He larded his prose with such words as "gugglet" and "shroff" and "neave" - picturesque enough, but neither "plain" nor "literal". His addiction to smut distracts as well, especially in his notorious footnotes (if you want to learn how the most adroit courtesans bring their sphincter muscles into play, Burton's your man). It isn't so much his "turpiloquium", as he put it, which offends as the fussy antiquarianism of his smuttiness. He is simultaneously prurient and Pickwickian.
But, for all Burton's prodigious erudition, he traduced the text profoundly. The Arabic of the Nights is generally straightforward. Burton weighed it down with gratuitous flourishes. Though he wanted his translation to scandalise Victorian philistinism, he himself - to speak in "Burtonese" - sheathed the sexual candour of the text in virtually prophylactic lewdness; and the effect is not bold but coy.
By contrast, the Lyons translation is lucid and beautifully modulated. Lyons is alert to the nuances of the original. He is as good at the bawdy as he is at the sublime. He translates all the verse with which the tales are interspersed; most of it is doggerel, but he makes even that pleasantly readable. In one of the most thrilling tales, that of Ali Shar and Zumurrud, he conveys with equal ease the tenderness of the two lovers - he an impoverished merchant, she a clever slave-girl - the pungent coarseness of the Kurdish brigand who abducts her, the brisk cruelty of Zumurrud's revenge, and the lovers' eventual reunion, in which passion and slapstick coincide. Zumurrud, disguised as a man, has become king and when Ali is brought to her bed, expecting the worst, he is surprised to find that the "king" has skin "smoother than silk and softer than butter." At first he murmurs, "This king is better than any woman", but as he extends his caresses, he is astounded: "The king has a vagina." Zumurrud bursts out laughing and at last he recognises her. (In Burton's version, "Quoth Ali in himself: Verily, our King hath a coynte; this is indeed a wonder of wonders!")
