A career in travel and languages
Burton joined the Indian army in 1842 and worked on the survey of Sind, studying languages and making notes on the region. In 1853 he entered Mecca under an assumed identity. Later expeditions took him to Somalia and into East Africa in the search for the source of the Nile.
He entered the consular service and held posts in West Africa, Brazil, Damascus and Trieste. He and Isabel Burton married in 1861, and she became closely involved in the publication and preservation of his work. His output included travel narratives and translations of The Arabian Nights and Camões. He died in Trieste in 1890.
A storyteller and an invented poet
Vikram and the Vampire adapts tales associated with the Baital-Pachisi. A king carries a corpse inhabited by a spirit, whose stories repeatedly force him to answer difficult questions. Isabel edited the 1893 Memorial Edition held here. The Kasidah uses another kind of narrative disguise. Burton presents his philosophical poem as the work of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, with a supposed translator signing himself F. B. The invented identities let verse and commentary speak in different voices. Lumitheca’s 1919 Book Club of California edition adds an introduction by Aurelia Henry Reinhardt.
