The Book of Beautiful Boys (book)

Front cover, 2024

The Book of Beautiful Boys published by Arcadian Dreams in September 2024 by Fazil Bey (Author), The Pasha with Three Tails (Author), Edmund Marlowe (Editor), J. M. Thian (Translator).

Overview

Enderunlu Fazil Bey was an Ottoman courtier of Palestinian birth who had been selected as a beautiful teenager for education in the Sultan’s seraglio in Constantinople. He became an innovative poet of love not satisfied with stale conventional imitation of Persian precedents. Typically of a cultured man of his age and adopted land, he expressed erotic interest in both women and boys, but showed a more serious interest in the latter as a worthier subject. In his long poem The Book of Beautiful Boys, written in 1792/3, he answers from rich experience a beloved boy’s question as to which nations have the most beautiful boys.

A little over a century later, an anonymous Frenchman commissioned someone jokingly called the Pasha with Three Tails, allegedly at least a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Turk familiar with Fazil’s work and sharing his taste, to adapt his poem to French ideas of the time as to what was scintillatingly and exotically erotic. The resulting Livre des Beaux, published in 1909 in a Paris that was then Europe’s centre for the production of semi-illicit erotica, and now at last translated into English over another century later, is thus a charming blend of the erotic spirit of two lost ages.

With its unabashed and often unflattering appraisal of the varying attributes of boys of different nationalities, this is definitely not a book for the politically correct, but offers fascinating entertainment for those not thus afflicted. Enderunlu Fazil Bey was an Ottoman courtier of Palestinian birth who had been selected as a beautiful teenager for education in the Sultan’s seraglio in Constantinople. He became an innovative poet of love not satisfied with stale conventional imitation of Persian precedents. Typically of a cultured man of his age and adopted land, he expressed erotic interest in both women and boys, but showed a more serious interest in the latter as a worthier subject. In his long poem The Book of Beautiful Boys, written in 1792/3, he answers from rich experience a beloved boy’s question as to which nations have the most beautiful boys.

A little over a century later, an anonymous Frenchman commissioned someone jokingly called the Pasha with Three Tails, allegedly at least a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Turk familiar with Fazil’s work and sharing his taste, to adapt his poem to French ideas of the time as to what was scintillatingly and exotically erotic. The resulting Livre des Beaux, published in 1909 in a Paris that was then Europe’s centre for the production of semi-illicit erotica, and now at last translated into English over another century later, is thus a charming blend of the erotic spirit of two lost ages.

With its unabashed and often unflattering appraisal of the varying attributes of boys of different nationalities, this is definitely not a book for the politically correct, but offers fascinating entertainment for those not thus afflicted.

External links

• The Book of Beautiful Boys (Available at Amazon)