Who was Henry Torrens?
Henry Torrens was a British official, poet, translator and satirist in colonial India. In 1838 he published in Calcutta the first volume of an English translation of the Thousand and One Nights made from an Arabic manuscript, and he was the first to render its poetry in verse. The Afghan war and the rivalry of Edward Lane’s translation left his work unfinished and forgotten, until Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves (2017).
“Torrens’s translation of the Arabian Nights remained unfinished, and this alone might explain the neglect into which it has fallen, but it is the invisible thread that weaves through the history of the Arabian Nights in English.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 93
“Torrens’s translation has hardly been discussed at length before, and Horta’s discussion makes it clear that the production of his version in the context of Indian colonial history is crucial to understanding the evolution of the Arabian Nights in English.”
More from critics and scholars (3)
“In his revealing biography of Torrens, Horta has the opportunity to explore the mysterious provenance of the Macan manuscript, which appeared in the estate of a British officer and Arabist in 1836.”
“[Paul] Lucas has thus far attracted little scholarly attention. The same is true of Henry Torrens, who published an incomplete translation of the Arabian Nights in 1838, but who does not even rate an entry in Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen’s two-volume Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004).”
“[Of the translators Horta examines,] the first, Henry Torrens, attempted a fluent translation from a newly acquired manuscript while working in colonial India and trying to promote a free press and British understanding of indigenous languages and cultures.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
Global mainstream impact
- 1 January 2017Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
- February 2017Robert Irwin, Literary Review
- 16 March 2017Clare Dight, The National
- 3 December 2017Aqsa Ijaz, Dawn