The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

The census overstates Burton's primacy in two directions and both need naming. Antoine Galland's 'Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en françois', Paris: la Veuve Claude Barbin and successors, 12 volumes 1704-1717, is the first European translation and the edition that created the Western canon — Aladdin and Ali Baba included, the so-called orphan tales that appear in no Arabic manuscript source and enter world literature here. In English, the first complete and unexpurgated translation is not Burton's but John Payne's 'The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night', London: Villon Society, 9 volumes 1882-1884, privately printed and limited to 500 numbered copies; Burton drew heavily on Payne — by his own account with permission — and Payne afterwards made his irritation plain. Burton's 1885-88 Kama Shastra set is correctly identified as the collected annotated English translation collectors pursue, and the Terminal Essay is his alone, but it is the second complete English rendering, not the first. Collections that take this text seriously hold Payne and Burton together, with Galland alongside for the French.