Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
I've started working on Burton's translation of "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night". The PG version is not in very good state (lots of missing hyphens, split words and OCR errors), the ebooks@Adelaide one is supposed to be improved, but does not seem much better. At least the first volume is reasonably correct in Wikisource, so I'm using that as a starting point, and I'm applying all corrections there too. |
There's also another website that has the Burton etexts:
Wollamshram World.
IMHO, Burton's translation isn't that great; he basically took John Payne's translation and "sexed it up" a bit. He also added at least one story that isn't in the Arabic original. (For more information on Burton's translation, see
this article.)
If you're interested in re-reading 1001 nights, I can fully recommend the contemporary translation by
Malcolm C. Lyons. The slightly older English translation by
Powys Mathers (1892–1939) is also not bad. Unfortunately, Mathers' translation doesn't seem to be available as an etext.