This is extremely exciting news for me.
I have long been a fan of the Arabian Nights but it has been very hard to find a decent translation. The Nights is quite racy and all of the stuff we have been exposed to over the years has been quite heavily censored (or should I say “Appled“). I have the 16 volume Burton translation published by the Burton Society, the only complete, unexpurgated translation I’m aware of, but Burton’s prose is really, really weird. It is not easy reading.
In 2008, I ordered, from Amazon UK, the new hardcover, 3 volume, slipcased translation published by Penguin. I don’t think this edition has ever been released in the US. This new translation is the first complete translation done since 1885 and has received fantastic reviews. I paid £85, including shipping. (I guess I got a good deal because in writing this article I checked the current price on Amazon UK and its going for £650 as a collectible in “like new” condition.)
Well, I never read it – and do you know why? It’s too heavy. The entire set clocks in at 10 pounds. That’s over 3 pounds per volume. I could never carry a volume around with me and it made my hands ache to hold one. The picture above is my boxed set with my Kindle, containing the same text, leaning against it.
For some odd reason I decided today to see if it has been released here in the US as a Kindle edition – and so it has! From what I can gather from Amazon, Penguin released the volumes here in the US as trade paperbacks, not hardcovers. In a very confusing pricing scheme Amazon says that the “Digital List Price” is $24.74, the “Print List Price” is $20 and the “Kindle Price” is $12.24. Does that make any sense?
After checking the Amazon previews to be sure these were the same as the hardcovers I got from the UK, I bought all 3 volumes for my Kindle at the $12.24, each, price and can’t wait to start them. Text to speech is enabled, by the way, and for something this long (around 3,000 printed pages) it may be a real boon in getting through it. You can find volume 1 here. By the way, with typical ebook/publisher sloppiness, volume 1 is labeled volume 1, volume 3 is labeled volume 3, but volume 2 is not labeled with a volume number at all, either on Amazon or on the title page of the book itself.
For anyone who is interested in Middle Eastern literature, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is available in a Kindle edition for $15. It’s an awful lot of fun. Again, it’s an uncensored version of a tale that is, in part, over 1,000 years old and is a wonderful translation from the Urdu. Highly recommended.
It’s great to have Arabian Nights on Kindle.
The Scott translation and the Burton translation of Arabian Nights are both available free from Manybooks.net.
Although, on closer rereading, it sounds like the version Paul is talking about is a newer translation.