Risible Rhymes: Or The Book to Bring a Smile to the Lips of Devotees of Proper Taste and Style Throught the Decoding of a Sampling of the Verse of the ... His Sins: 31 (Library of Arabic Literature) - Hardcover

Al-Sanhūrī, Muḥammad Ibn Maḥfūẓ

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1479877921 ISBN 13: 9781479877928

Publisher: NYU Press, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ al-Sanhūrī is an eleventh/seventeenth-century author who likely hailed from Egypt’s Fayyum region, although nothing else is known about him.

Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded by Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, as well as editions and translations of al-Tūnisī’s In Darfur and al-Sanhūrī’s Risible Rhymes from the same era. In addition, he has compiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitled Al-ʿāmmiyyah al-miṣriyyah al-maktūbah: mukhtārāt min 1400 ilā 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009) and co-authored, with Lesley Lababidi, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo. He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. He is affiliated with the American University in Cairo.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1479877921
• ISBN 13: 9781479877928
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128