Let in the Djinns 

Maya Jasanoff

Trieste, it has been said, is a nowhere of sorts: unreal, isolated, out of time, attractive to exiles, unknown to almost everybody else. So it was an apt city to serve as the final home of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of miles into central Africa and out, seeking the source of the Nile; he had mastered swordsmanship in numerous styles and learned falconry in Sindh; he had lived in Brazil and visited war-torn Paraguay, hunted for gold in West Africa, and surveyed Icelandic sulphur reserves. He had published some twenty books and could chatter freely in at least two dozen languages. No wonder this ‘nowhere’ seemed to hold nothing for him. He was bored and in physical decline; his requests for a transfer or early retirement were denied. There was nothing for it, he realised, but to let in the djinns. Burton began translating Arabic stories he had long loved, hundreds of them. His pages swelled with rocs, afreets, talking fish, wonderful lamps, wizards, eunuchs and stallions from the sea. His encyclopedic store of memories poured into explanatory notes on the shape of bottles in Egypt, the style of beards in Persia, on twig toothbrushes, ant attacks, preparations of ambergris and opium – and, most copiously, detailed varieties of sexual technique. If for nothing else, the world should remember Trieste for the 16-volume Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-88), Burton’s literary triumph, and a vast exercise in vicarious thrills.

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