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

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СКАЧАТЬ Shirbīnī’s time, both these positions have contributed to exiling ʿāmmiyyah from written Arabic. And together with the Renaissance’s tyranny of the serious, I feel, it is this that explains Shirbīnī’s obscurity. The irony is that it is still thanks only to an Arabist like Davies that I have any access to this seminal work, which, perhaps more than any other, tells me who I am linguistically.

      AN ACCOUNT OF ITS INTENT

      “Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded” is the translator’s rendition of the book’s rhymed-prose title, which translates literally as “Shaking Skulls by Commenting on Abū Shādūf’s Verse.”

      The word for “skulls” (or, more accurately, “crania,” hence “brains”), quḥūf, can also mean “headgear,” yielding the humorous image of a “dung-eater” mindlessly nodding his head. More often in the book, however, quḥūf is used in the extant colloquial sense of “boneheads.” A withering reference to the fellahin, its implication is that of “boors.”

      There is therefore ambiguity in the original “shaking” (hazz), which besides the peasants idiotically shaking their own heads could refer either to the readers shaking their heads in exasperation and amusement at the peasants or to the author metaphorically taking hold of peasant heads and shaking (or breaking) them in disparagement and ridicule.

      This is interesting because it suggests that the book may be confounded with its subject. It is indubitable that in satirizing and parodying the fellahin—however mordantly—Shirbīnī ends up embracing, even celebrating their language and ways more than any other writer I know of.

      (This includes later 20th-century figures like ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Jamal, whose 1992 novel Muḥib, named after a village not far from Shirbīn, explicitly mimics the language and ways of the countryside, albeit sympathetically.)

      My feeling in fact is that Shirbīnī is less haughtily removed from the life of ahl al-rīf (or “country people,” as he calls them) than his text pretends. There has been considerable debate as to whether my late 17th-century namesake was a merchant, a bookseller, a minor religious scholar, or merely a ṣāḥib mazag (or “owner of a [high] humor”), as a modern Egyptian might describe the kind of majlis—or “literary salon”—frequenting “man of culture” he is believed to have been.

      But the narrator, if not necessarily the author of Brains Confounded, is incontestably a rancorous man full of reactionary vitriol. His writing betrays a lack of learning even by Decay standards, and his attitude is that of someone who defensively promotes himself by dissociating from a despised group. It is not impossible to see his censure of the fellahin as a convoluted if typical form of (negative) self-assertion, especially since it is likely the real Shirbīnī, however urbanized, was of peasant stock.

      (I feel connected to this eccentric Jonathan Swift of the Nile Delta in more than just a literary way. Shirbīn, the eastern Delta town after which he is named, is exactly nine miles from al-Zarqā, the town in which my father was born, lived until the age of sixteen, and is buried.)

      Society may have been differently constituted in the 1670s. But it is tempting to recall that, while townsfolk do make a show of deriding the peasantry in Egypt, for as long as anyone remembers this has been more of an affectation than a conviction, since the sweeping majority of Cairo and Alexandria dwellers owe strong cultural and emotional allegiances to (real or imagined) peasant roots.

      My own critical conceit is that the “I” of Brains Confounded is an invention of the author’s whose diatribes are intended to be at least as risible as the subjects they target. This need not imply that Shirbīnī consciously created a funny, fellahin-hating alter-ego. Rather, he simply gave himself over—in writing—to a humorous mood or habit of mind in which the peasantry conversationally becomes a metonym for all that is repulsive and laughable.

      AND, FINALLY, AN ACCOUNT OF ITS CONTENT

      Written partly in rhymed prose (sajʿ)—a feature it shares with most Decay texts, and one that Davies manages to approximate to a remarkably satisfying degree—Brains Confounded is in fact two books in one. The first part is a treatise on three categories of peasant (commoners, religious scholars, and dervishes). Ostensibly, it is offered by way of introducing and contextualizing the main subject, or ultimate purpose (gharaḍ), of the book:

      [A]mong the rural verse to come my way … and which has become the subject of comment in certain salons, was the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” … Then [a patron] whom I cannot disobey and with whose commands I have no choice but to comply besought me to stick on it a commentary …

      The second is that same commentary (sharḥ), presented alongside the poem in the traditional style.

      The point has been made that this is more of a parody of the sharḥ genre than an actual sharḥ, just as the “ode” itself, considering what it has Abū Shādūf say of himself and his people, cannot have been written by a real peasant but must be a spoof of fellahin verse.

      Unlike the sprawling, raucous critique of the fellahin in the first part, the poem-and-sharḥ may appear at first to be less accessible to a reader in English, since much of what this part of the book plays on has to do with etymology, meter, and literary precedent. But, coupled with Abū Shādūf’s impossible self-vilification, Shirbīnī’s way of replacing the high-minded sublime with the dung-smeared mundane to hilarious effect is perfectly reflected in the English text. Here is a relatively mild example:

      Now I wonder, how is flaky-pastry-in-milk?

      At the thought of its gulping [zalṭihā] my heart beats violently! …

      The word zalṭ (“swallowing without chewing, gulping”) derives from zalaṭ (“pebbles”) … The zalṭ (“gulping”) of food is named after the latter because of the smoothness and quickness of the action, which occurs without chewing; or because the piece of food that is gulped down resembles a large pebble, for a pebble, when thrown from the hand, gains force and speed, as witness the expression “A pebble in your head!” for example, meaning, “May a blow from a pebble strike your head at speed so that the striking impacts upon it!”

      Still, even as a satire of the countryside, let alone a lampoon of countryside literature, the book goes far beyond its brief. It is a lewd letter in the style of the great 12th-century writer of manāmāt (or texts purporting to be accounts of dreams) Rukn al-Dīn al-Wahrānī. It is a subject-specific encyclopedia in the Egyptian tradition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Abshīhī (1388-1448) and, before him, the somewhat more serious Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī (1279-1333), whose The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition appeared last year in Elias Muhanna’s translation. It is a pile of anecdotes and tales-within-tales using stock characters, settings, and tropes that recalls The Thousand and One Nights. In the attention it pays food and different ways of preparing it, it might even qualify as a late medieval cookbook.

      Ultimately, however—and this may be Shirbīnī’s true genius—Brains Confounded is about nothing much beyond its own, lasting effervescence. Neither fellahin literature nor city-versus-country lore are ends so much as means to a conversational brand of literary delight. In which capacity the book has definitely survived not only the passage of time but the passage into English as well.

      Indeed, should you choose to imagine that no Arabic text ever existed, that what you’re reading is a kind of Borgesian fabulation, this translation would remain a powerful enough literary creation to stand on its own.

      Youssef СКАЧАТЬ