Описание:

One of history’s most romantic characters, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) merits this definitive life by Edward Rice for his substantial accomplishments alone, unembellished by his adventures. However, Rice, in his engrossing retracing of Burton’s life, covers every facet: Burton the towering intellectual and physical specimen, face scarred by a Somali warrior’s spear; Burton the scholar and author; Burton the scientist, soldier, explorer, and British undercover agent to boot.

Edward Rice has devoted the better part of ten years to researching Burton’s life, at times risking his own in his travels through India, the Near East, and Africa. Burton was one of the very first Europeans to seek the source of the Nile in Central Africa, as daring then as a trip to the moon now. He was the first European to reach Lake Tanganyika. In disguise he went to the then forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina. He was the first European to penetrate the sacred city of Harar in unexplored East Africa. It was Burton who brought out to the Western world the classic Indian book on sex, the Kama Sutra. And—perhaps his most celebrated achievement—Burton did the seventeen-volume translation of the classic Arabian Nights.

Rice recounts Burton’s outspoken efforts on behalf of women’s sexual liberation during the height of Victorian conventionalism. Burton’s translations of The Perfumed Garden and of the Ananga Ranga were the first in English of these erotic classics. Not only was he critical of English repression of women’s self-fulfillment, he also complained about England’s colonial misrule. Rice notes, as well, Burton’s extraordinary scholarship on the origins of language. He himself had mastered some twenty-nine languages and dialects. It was as a member of the East India Company in India that he also operated as an undercover agent. On one secret mission, he investigated the Mormons of Utah, the subject of his book The City of the Saints. On another Western Hemisphere venture, he explored the battlefields of Paraguay, out of which came a book about the war between Paraguay and Brazil. He was knighted during the last years of his life.