Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

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СКАЧАТЬ the same time, however, al-Shirbīnī appears to disclaim any subversive intent by applying to his commentary descriptors such as “silly” (habālī) (as noted above), “facetious” (fashrawī) (§5.8.20, vol. 2, §11.4.8, etc.), or “lame” (fushkulī) (§5.3.10).

      Al-Shirbīnī’s attitude to the implications of his parody of textual commentary thus appears ambiguous, though affirmation of its validity as a genre, and of the validity of the assumptions that underpin it, predominate.

      It remains for me to acknowledge the help that I have received in preparing this revised edition and translation of al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded, and the edition and translation of al-Sanhūrī’s Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq, which will be published separately. Without the goodwill of the executive editors of the Library of Arabic Literature, headed by General Editor Philip F. Kennedy, the enterprise would never have gotten off the ground. It was kept in that position by the generous help and input of, first and foremost, Geert Jan van Gelder, who read the work in both languages and made numerous corrections, suggestions, and improvements; further invaluable assistance was provided by James Montgomery. I was also fortunate to have the input of my Cairo colleague Ahmed Seddik, who helped me to unravel many of the complexities of Risible Rhymes, of Noah Gardiner, who made an assessment of the manuscript of the latter, and of Adam Talib. Last, but by no means least, I benefited from the unfailing support of Stuart Brown, Gemma Juan-Simó, and, above all, Chip Rossetti, all of the New York office of the Library of Arabic Literature.

      Note on the Text

The present edition of the Arabic text is a revised version of that published in 2005, which was based on a stemma developed from a review of eight manuscripts and the first printed edition (Bulaq 1274/1858).⁷¹

      The 2005 edition established a text that differed significantly from that of the then-available printed editions. Most importantly, from the perspective of content, it restored several passages found in all the manuscripts but missing from the Bulaq edition. The longest of these, in the section on rural dervishes, or fuqarāʾ, (§§7.1–7.29 and §§7.31–7.32 in the present edition), is over five thousand words; without the passage, this section is notably shorter in the Bulaq edition than the sections on peasant cultivators (fallāḥūn), and rural pastors/teachers (fuqahāʾ). The restoration of these passages redresses this imbalance and allows us to see more clearly the importance that al-Shirbīnī attributed to the role of dervishes on the rural stage and the vehemence of his animosity towards them. Also restored in the 2005 edition are the last twenty-nine lines of the poem, in rajaz meter, with which Part One ends.

      The 2005 edition also omits several passages found only in the Bulaq edition and consisting largely of quotations taken from the mainstream jurisprudential, historical, polite-letters (adab), and classical-verse traditions; these appear to have been inserted in a pietistic or didactic spirit and often have little relevance to their context.

      Finally, at the level of language, the 2005 edition appears more rough-hewn than the Bulaq edition. Many “Middle Arabic” features that occur, inconsistently, in the manuscripts and were “corrected,” inconsistently, in the Bulaq edition are maintained there.

      All the above features have been retained in the present edition, which does, however, differ from its predecessor in one important area: in this edition a less laissez-faire approach has been taken to the meter of verse in the standard (i.e., non-“rural”) language. Major violations of meter have been corrected, often by reference to citations in other works. In practice, this has often meant returning to the readings of the Bulaq edition, whose editors no doubt went through the same process. In making these changes, we have been guided by the maxim that most poets would rather commit errors of grammar than of meter and that the solecisms that have been removed probably represent the slips of unschooled copyists rather than admissible variants to what are, in many cases, well-known lines of verse. Without these metrical faux pas the verse is often, naturally, less hurtful to the ear.

“Rural” verse poses particular metrical problems. The verses that al-Shirbīnī so characterizes exhibit both colloquial and literary features. Taking the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” as an example, it may be seen that readings imposed by the meter (al-ṭawīl) sometimes contradict colloquial norms by including both short word-final vowels that conform to literary rules (e.g., yaqūlu, vol. 2, §11.1) and short word-final vowels that conform to neither colloquial nor literary rules (e.g., Abū Shādūfi, vol. 2, §11.1). In the latter case, one cannot be certain how these would have been pronounced; here we treat them as remnants of an underlying literary form (Abū Shādūfin → Abū Shādūfi), though we might, with equal validity, have assigned to them any other character to represent this unknown vowel (e.g., Abū Shādūfo). Examples of tanwīn also occur (e.g., lawʿatun, vol. 2, §11.5). As van Gelder has pointed out, “it would seem that one is supposed to read as many classical forms as possible . . . to the extent of producing hybrid forms.”⁷² Indeed, such verses might be described as belonging, as a whole, to a hybrid colloquial/literary language variety. Nonfinal short vowels in colloquial words, in prose or in verse, are given literary values (e.g., miḥrāt, “plow,” rather than muḥrāt). This convention is employed simply to avoid having to justify the voweling for every transcribed colloquial word, it being assumed that that voweling was not always the same in the seventeenth century as it is now. Occasional exceptions are made, either because the author makes a colloquial spelling explicit (e.g., libbih for libbah (vol. 2, §11.23.9) and yiʿiffu for yaʿiffu (vol. 2, §11.36.14)) or because the meter demands colloquial forms (e.g., wa-yitʿanṭaz . . . wa-yijjaʿmaṣ (vol. 2, §10.11.3).

In the case of the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” itself, we have found it necessary, in this edition, to revise our understanding of the acceptable parameters of the meter in question. Thus, while the only possible endings of a line in standard ṭawīl meter are SLLL, SLSL, and SLL,⁷³ the frequent occurrence of SLX SL or SLL L in the “Ode” have convinced us that this unconventional form is intentional. New vocalizations have therefore been given in this edition. Thus we read, for example, yaḍāl naḥīf (vol. 2, §11.1) and khulbat līf (vol. 2, §11.4). This adjustment also allows us to avoid such bizarre forms, required by the standard meter, as takhawīf and tajarīf in favor of takhwīf (vol. 2, §11.6) and tajrīf (vol. 2, §11.14).

The footnotes to the 2005 edition, which contain all variants that are viable according to the stemma (family tree of the manuscripts), have been omitted from this edition. Here, with rare exceptions, only corrections to the 2005 edition, whether of the metrical solecisms mentioned above or of misprints, are included, though only where these affect the consonantal skeleton. In such cases, the original form is preceded by بي, standing for “Peeters: OLA 141.” When the new form is not to be found among the variants listed in the apparatus of the 2005 edition, that is, does not occur in any of the witnesses, all readings are noted.⁷⁴ The exceptions concern one passage present in the 2005 text that has been excluded from the present edition, based on a reexamination of the stemma (see §1.4), and the replacement, in the verse and commentary, of طحونتنا (“our mill”) (§5.8) with طاحوننا since, though the former is supported stemmatically for Brains Confounded, it does not fit the meter, and the latter, which does fit the meter, is the form found in Risible Rhymes.

      In this edition, verses that are the subject of commentary are indented; other verses are right-aligned. Reiterations in the body of the text of verses that are the subject of commentary are enclosed in parentheses, following the example of the first Bulaq edition (in the manuscripts, such verses and their pericopes are generally distinguished by marks such as a triangle of dots, or overlining, or rubrication, or a combination of these).

The present translation is a revised version of that published in 2007.⁷⁵ СКАЧАТЬ