An Arabian Storyteller Gives Me Blueballs

I've been flirting with Scheherazade's stories for a long while. Reading them seems a struggle, though a glad one.

My first contact with The Arabian Nights was an uncensored version of the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" when I was maybe fourteen years old. That's the famous tale from which the phrase "Open sesame!" originates. It contains a description of a man being carved into quarters and hung on a wall as a warning to that same man's brother. I loved it.

In 2007, back when I was a foolish young lad who didn't care to research different translations before embarking on one, I bought and read the Barnes & Noble bargain paperback edition. "Boy," I thought more than once, "I remember these stories being more gruesome." I kept reading. I had a great time... but it could've been much better; I learned after reading about a thousand pages that the version of the Nights I'd just finished was a neutered version of a declawed version of the original tales, and that many of the more explicit stories had just been omitted, censored entirely. Serious bummer; a thousand pages took a long time to read. I learned from the experience.

In 2008 I bought a CRW Publishing LTD incarnation of The Arabian Nights that uses a translation by Sir Richard Burton. It faithfully presents all the racism, violence, and eroticism for view. What I've read of it is already miles better than the B&N version that'd had its testicles removed. The problem is that this edition is enormous, not easily portable... and it still doesn't have all of the stories. Perhaps there are just too many to collect in one volume. Until I can afford a six-volume set, I guess I'm jolly well fucked.

Well, I'll leave you with a cute passage from a particular scene where a "lucky" porter has fallen in with some beautiful gals who're toying with him:

All this time the Porter was carrying on with them, kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering; whilst one thrust a dainty morsel in his mouth, and another slapped him; and this cuffed his cheeks and that threw sweet flowers at him; and he was in the very paradise of pleasure, as though he were sitting in the seventh sphere among the Houris of Heaven.

That's it for tonight. Goodnight!