from The Arabian Nights

Good advice is hard to come by. And yet, every blue moon or so in my lusty wanderings among the deepest darkest library stacks, I stumble upon a poem or snippet from the classics that can be readily applied to life’s tough situations. In various parts of the book, I have argued that Rabelais gives good advice for keeping your partner faithful, that flirting lessons can be learned from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, that Goethe shows you how to balance ambition and eros, and that Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” was a more convincing version of “Let’s Get It On” than even Marvin Gaye’s. Who’s to say that High Art and Self-Help have to be at opposite ends of the shelf?

This excerpt has it both ways. Taken from one of the crown jewels of the Arabic tradition, the incomparable Arabian Nights, it provides a useful stratagem for convincing your lover to let you take the road less traveled. Few people read Scheherazade’s tale in its entirety; most often because it comes in expurgated editions, bowdlerized by its translators and editors. Not so in Sir Richard Burton’s original, nineteenth-century rendition, which is as licentious and brilliant as Burton himself. The great British ambassador, who spent much of his life sampling the pleasures, peculiarities, and perversions of Arabic cultures, was a superman if there ever was one. He spoke more than twenty languages, was among the first English translators of the Kama Sutra, The Arabian Nights, and countless other Eastern classics, and he lived a life of highest adventure and eroticism. Like the anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, Burton made no separation between sexual and cultural exploration. As a result, he probably achieved as great a synthesis of learning and loving as anyone in history. I modified his translation a bit to remove some obscurities and infelicities, but what remains is a rhetoric for encouraging what’s sometimes called The Catholic Girl’s Compromise. Who would have guessed at the incidental benefits of population control?

“My soul thy sacrifice! I choose thee out
Who are not menstrous or oviparous:
Should I with women mell, I’d beget
Brats till the wide world grew straight for us.
“She respondeth (sore hurt in sense most acute
For she had proffered what did not besuit):
“Unless thou stroke as man should swive his dear,
Blame me not when horns on thy brow appear.
Thy wand seems waxen, to a limpness grown,
And more I palm it, softer grows the clown!”
And I to her: “If thy coynte I do reject
There might be elsewhere we could connect.”
And yet, she showed again her tender coynte,
And I was forced to cry: “I will not roger thee!”
She drew back saying, “From the faith
He turns, who’s turned by Heaven’s decree!
And front-wise futters, both night and day,
Most times in ceaseless persistency.”
Then swung she the round and shining rump
Like silvern lump she showed me.
I cried: “Well done, O mistress mine!
No more am I in pain for thee!
O thou of all that Allah oped
Showest me fairest victory!”

—translated by Sir Richard Burton