Today I have been thinking a lot about Sir Richard Burton. Born in 1821, Burton was in some ways very typical of the adventurous explorers of his time. He started off as a captain in the army of the East India Company, serving in both India and the Crimea. After this, he led expeditions funded by the National Geographic Society to Mecca and the East Coast of Africa.
But what intrigues me more about Burton, considering the time in which he lived, was his startlingly open views on sex. Looking at his childhood gives us no hint as to why he was so extraordinarily open-minded for his time period, but what is clear is that he deplored the prevailing attitudes on the subject and, when he finally returned and settled in Britain, he was responsible for acquainting the West with some of the world’s most famous erotic texts: The Kama Sutra, 1001 Arabian Nights, and The Perfumed Garden.
What haunts my mind tonight is the image of his widow standing in the garden of his house, burning what she considered to be his ‘sinful’ texts, including his translation of The Perfumed Garden.
I remember the first time I ever heard the story of this; how the anger it triggered took me by surprise. And still, today, when I think of that woman, caught up in her self-righteous fervor, consigning this man’s works to the flames and insisting that it was the ghost of her husband who was exhorting her to do it, I get absolutely fucking livid.
Admittedly, an earlier and less concise version of many of those texts survive because he’d sent them to his life-long friend, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, but his final translation, with its last chapter was lost forever.
I find it bitterly ironic that people who seek to suppress or destroy works they find personally offensive for the sake of ‘public good’, never stop to consider the injury they do by denying others access to those works. So sure are they that they are saving us all from ourselves, they have and continue to impoverish us in a selfish act of fanning the flames of their own petty moral indignations.
The last chapter of The Perfumed Garden – the one that is now gone forever – was on the subject of pederasty. Not really my cup of tea, personally. But the fact that I now no longer have the choice of whether to read it or not – the fact that this choice has been taken away from me by someone in a fit of self-righteousness – this will never, ever cease to anger me.
And so tonight, 120 years after that destructive act, I’m going to bed angry.
Material on Sir Richard Francis Burton on the web:
Burtoniana: A collection of his books and articles
U Penn: A list of all his translations available online
An earlier translation of The Perfumed Garden
A Channel 4 Documentary Burton available for download through Veoh.
Agreed. No-one has the right to destroy the work of others in that way; it is nothing less than cultural vandalism. The destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan made me feel viciously angry. I think that it is the finality, as well as the wickedness, of such acts that induces the impotent rage that one experiences.
I agree – wicked is an extremely good word for it.
Thanks, Rgrl, for putting these important matters in front of us again. Burton is really germane to the discussion we’ve been having about art, society, convention, power/control, the taboo… Censorship angers me, in all its forms, for a complex tangle of reasons.
Pity…not anger, pity. The exact circumstances & facts of the situation may not be known…perhaps the womans convictions where weak and she yielded to pressure or perhaps her convictions were as strong as his…if the story is true.
I’m sorry, I just can’t work up pity. What a terrible betrayal of a person, of their life’s work, of their passion.
I would pity her if she’d pulled out a shotgun and blown his head off. I can’t imagine he was the best of husbands. Just as long as she didn’t burn his writing.
I found a copy of this interpretation of the Kama Sutra in my adosescence on a drug store paperback display, in of all places, Louisville Kentucky. It may have been the difference between joining or being passed by the Sexual Revolution.
I share in your outrage at the act of Burtons Widow. In preparing a response, I looked briefly through Wickipedias article on the Burning of the Library of Alexandria in Classical Times. I found to my amazement that it was torched not once but several times. My take on it from my first reading of this inestimable loss was a scenario of unwashed Christians slashing literate Hypatia; its last Librarian with Oyster Shells. Before her however, a Roman Emporer had it at least partially burned.
Then the real shock; checking a list there of “Book Burning” showed scores of book burnings world wid. Though various Christian Denominations were abundantly represented, they are by no means unique. Time forbids my finding the Author of the statement: When they burn books, it isn’t long before they burn People. My reaction to these losses isn’t rage. I am almost crying openly in a cafe. But as a man that weeps first and rages and plans next this has inspired a reaction in me: The Hypatia Project. I will fill several thumb drives, and when
time and finances allow micro slides of gold etched on glass, of all the Erotica, Philosophy, and Science that time and energies allow.
Below is a Poem I once wrote on this subject:
1. Truths Way
5-15-1967
Lies have become their monument.
They hope to extinguish truths bright candle.
They have their monument of excelsior,
But truth shall be its vandal!
“We burned the things in which it lived,
Though no one now does need them.
The fires once burned hot and high,
No longer do we feed them.â€
“We killed the things in which it dwelled.â€
“Its vessel,†they said “is broken.â€
“We have silenced all dissenting tongues.â€
“It shall not again be spoken.â€
Lies for a while shall rule this place.
Truth lies subdued by an ignorant fist.
But lies endure only as long as believed,
Truth needs but itself to exist!