[Cicero]

I once read through Richard Burton’s translation of A Thousand Nights and a Night, which was in my Uncle’s library. Interesting. Although I noticed that the stories seemed to be overly preoccupied with having sex with virgins. There was a little rhyme that Burton repeated, each time that happened:

“A pearl never thridden, A filly never ridden.”

I must say, my opinion of Islam is such now that I don’t think I could ever go back and read any of it again.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

There is a strong suggestion that Burton stole the work of a brilliant translator named John Payne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Payne_%28poet%29

While Burton was versed in colloquial Arabic, Payne was a master both with it and literary Arabic, so his translations were far more accurate. However the question remains with the sources used by either men.

This is because most of these stories were from many centuries before, and were part of an oral tradition of storytellers who were the live entertainment in coffee shops, bars and brothels. Mostly gone today, there are still some storytellers in Turkey. But for a thousand years, they were about the only entertainment many towns and cities offered.

So who collected these tales?