Fantasy Anonymous (Burton Tr): The Thousand Nights and a Night, v.1, 29 September 2008

[Patricia]

The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night
A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments.
With Introduction Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights.
Translated and Annotated by Richard F. Burton
[Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton K.C.M.G. F.R.G.S. (1821–1890)]


This translation is not for children.

Richard Burton’s The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night was originally privately published by The Kama Shastra Society, in ten volumes, in 1885. This was a limited edition of 1000 copies (oddly, not 1001).
(A further six volumes were subsequently published as a Supplement to the Nights.)
This edition has used the online plain-text transcriptions from Project Gutenberg http://gutenberg.org, vols 1–10. These contain a number of errors, which I have tried to correct. Some undoubtedly remain.

Footnotes have been linked and collected at the end of the text. I have transliterated Greek characters, except from a line of Homer, which has been inserted as a picture.
I made the decision to insert line breaks within some couplets at the caesura. Unfortunately, few current electronic readers will display the whole line, so the caesura seemed the obvious place for a break. I have added some of the original artwork.

The file is about one and a half million words.

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