"Esoteric Pornography": Sir Richard Burton's Arabian Nights and the Origins of Pornography

Abstract

Translations, especially from the Latin and French, were the main stay of the nineteenth-century English trade in obscenity. Toward the end of the century, obscene translations of Indian and Arab texts emerged at the instigation of Sir Richard Burton (1821-90). Burton was renowned during his time as a traveler, explorer, oriental ist, anthropologist, writer, linguist, and translator. Although a com mitted imperialist, he was also fascinated with Arab culture. He is still remembered for his covert pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a Moslem, a disguise he refined by having himself circumcised (McLynn 74). He is best remembered, however, for his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night and Supplemental Nights ? commonly known as the Arabian Nights (1885-87). This was just one of many translations that he published through the Kama Shastra Society, the underground press with false headquarters in Cosmopoli and Benares that he founded with E E Arbuthnot and Richard Monckton-Milnes along the lines of the Oriental Translation Fund (Wright 86), but with the primary purpose of publishing erotic and semi-erotic Indian and Arab texts.