John Payne's Narrative Analysis

John Payne was in favour of making a literature-work translation than a kind of encyclopaedia of oriental manners and customs, also, he tried to provide a translation that it would paraphrase the obscene elements in order not to offend any of his readers (Irwin 27). Also, he was a friend of Richard Francis Burton and thus they had differences and similarities between them. A large part of Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights depends on Payne’s previous version. For example, in the opening of “The Tale of the Second Calender”, Payne has ‘seven schools’, Burton has ‘seven readings’; Burton’s pursuit for other possibilities to the vocabulary of Payne was consistently (Irwin 30). Furthermore, unlike Payne he tried to achieve repeating the rhymed prose of saj (Irwin 30).
Richard Francis Burton’s translation did not challenge ethnocentric or racist ideas but it confirmed the Orientalist’s stereotypes and images that readers of his time had due to the discourse colonialism (Shamma 51). Richards Francis Burton’s translation adopted a catholic way of thinking that he moved away a long distance into the Night’s Apocrypha. He did not find any Arabic originals ‘orphan

This is a negative review of Burton’s translation and the truth is that are many of them. It is obvious that his translation restated and perpetuated the Western age-old stereotypes about the East (Shamma 61). Burton’s foreignization approach made obvious the linguistic and cultural difference of Arabian Nights (Shamma 63). His longing was to preserve the translated text intact and the strategy that he followed was meant to provide “an accurate,’ anthropological’ picture of the Oriental life and character, preserving everything that the English Orthodox taste would find unpalatable” (Shamma