What is it they called him? 'Brilliant but unsound.' One would have to admit that he's had the last laugh in the eyes of posterity, though.Īll of which brings us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to Hershel Parker, the ostensible subject of this post. No wonder his employers, the British Foreign Office, exiled him to the backwater of Trieste in the (vain) hope of keeping him out of trouble. If they had agreed to lend it to him, he crowed, he would have felt honour-bound to suppress some of the more explicit passages, but since he’d had to pay for the pages out of his own pocket, he’d felt at liberty to spell out every last unsavoury detail for the delectation of his readers!) of the Nights – he’d had to employ someone to make primitive photocopies, or “sun pictures,” of it instead. It’s very amusing to read, though occasionally a little unedifying (in another part of the same volume he put in a long essay abusing Oxford’s Bodleian Library, who’d dared to deny him their copy of the famous Wortley-Montague ms. In one of the six “Supplemental” volumes to his infamous ten-volume translation of the Arabian Nights (1885-88), Richard Burton included a section called “The Reviewers Review’d,” in which he heaped scorn and contumely on various imprudent critics who’d thought to question his command of Arabic. 387-500 of the final volume of his massive translation of the 1001 Nights, he includes a section called 'The Reviewers Review'd.' This is how I described it in an earlier post on this blog: Well, obviously, Sir Richard Francis Burton (you can find more information about him at the link here). Burton: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (16 vols: 1885-88)

Herman Melville by Hershel Parker