| Risible Rhymes Contributor(s): Al-Sanhūrī, Muḥammad Ibn (Author), Davies, Humphrey (Editor), Davies, Humphrey (Translator) |
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ISBN: 1479877921 ISBN-13: 9781479877928 Publisher: New York University Press OUR PRICE: $28.50 Product Type: Hardcover Published: October 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Collections | Middle Eastern - Literary Criticism | African - History | Middle East - General |
| Dewey: 892.714 |
| LCCN: 2016028107 |
| Series: Library of Arabic Literature |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 6.2" W x 9" (0.70 lbs) 128 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Middle East |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Al-Sanhuri, Muhammad Ibn Mahfuz: - Muhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri is an 11th/17th-century author who likely hailed from Egypt's Fayyum region, although nothing else is known about him.Davies, Humphrey: - Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, four novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, ranslation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Hazz al-quhuf bi-sharh qasid Abi Shaduf (Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded) by Yusuf al-Shirbini and compiled with a colleague an anthology entitled Al-'ammiyyah al-misriyyah al-maktubah: mukhtarat min 1400 ila 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009). 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, where he lives. |