Risible Rhymes (Library of Arabic Literature (31))

Description

Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems―another popular genre of the day―and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbī. Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes offers intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanhūrī's day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era. A bilingual Arabic-English edition. Cover Risible Rhymes Title Copyright Table of Contents Letter from the General Editor Introduction Note on the Text Notes to the Introduction RISIBLE RHYMES Preamble The Author Declares His Intention to Decode a Sampling of Rural Verse and to Follow This with a Sampling of Hints, Wrangles, and Riddles A Sampling of the Verse of the Rural Rank and File “By God, by God, the Moighty, the Omnipotent” “You sleep while my eye by distance and insomnia’s distressed” “The soot of my paternal cousin’s oven is as black as your kohl marks” “And I said to her, ‘O daughter of noble men, go into the garden!’” “I asked after the beloved. They said, ‘He skedaddled from the shack!’” “I asked God to join me together with Salmā” “And I said to her, ‘Piss on me and spray!’” “The rattle staff of our mill makes a sound like your anklets” “I saw my beloved with a plaited whip driving oxen” “I ran into her and said, ‘My Lady, come tomorrow’” A Sampling of Hints and Riddles “O Scholars of Verse” “Avoid a friend who is like mā” “Hie thee to men in positions of eminence” “What is the name of a thing?” “My father I would give for the suns that turn away at sunset” “Were it not for difficulties, all men would be lords” “O dwelling of ʿĀtikah from which I depart” “She sent you ambergris” “An apple wounded by her front teeth” “If, in all your days, one friend you find” “I have not forgotten the time he visited me after his turning aside” “O you, ʿAlī, who have risen to the summit of virtue” A Wrangle over a Line by al-Mutanabbī The Author Mentions the Date of Composition of the Work and Apologizes for Its Brevity Notes Glossary Bibliography Index About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute About the Typefaces Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature About the Editor–Translator