Table of Contents Chapter 1: Raising a Storm 36 Chapter 2: A Bruising Fall and a Protecting Shawl 64 Chapter 3: Various Amusing Anecdotes 72 Chapter 4: Troubles and a Tambour 84 Chapter 5: A Priest and a Pursie, Dragging Pockets and Dry Grazing 92 Chapter 6: Food and Feeding Frenzies 108 Chapter 7: A Donkey that Brayed, a Journey Made, a Hope Delayed 116 Chapter 8: Bodega, Brethren, and Board 124 Chapter 9: Unseemly Conversations and Crooked Contestations 134 Chapter 10: Angering Women Who Dart Sideways Looks, and Claws like Hooks 148 Chapter 11: That Which Is Long and Broad 162 Chapter 12: A Dish and an Itch 174 Chapter 13: A Maqamah, or, a Maqamah on "Chapter 13" 190 Chapter 14: A Sacrament 202 Chapter 15: The Priest's Tale 212 Chapter 16: The Priest's Tale Continued 222 Chapter 17: Snow 244 Chapter 18: Bad Luck 254 Chapter 19: Emotion and Motion 282 Chapter 20: The Difference between Market-men and Bag-men 312
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (Author)
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805 or 1806-1887) was a
foundational figure in modern Arabic literature. Born to a
prominent Maronite family in Lebanon, al-Shidyāq was a pioneering
publisher, poet, essayist, lexicographer and translator. Known as
""the father of Arabic journalism,"" al-Shidyāq played a major role
in reviving and modernizing the Arabic language.
Humphrey Davies (Translator)
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.
"Its contemporaneity is astonishing... It would be doing Leg over
Leg a massive disservice to not make it clear how funny it is. This
is a book that for all its challenges, all its insight into
humanity, all its place in history, had me regularly laughing out
loud."
*Music and Literature*
"Humphrey Davies's masterful translation makes accessible this
unique and fascinating work, deserving of wider recognition and
study... The translation adroitly and sympathetically captures the
linguistic exuberance and literary inventiveness of the
original."
*Banipal Magazine*
"The heroic achievement of award-winning translator Humphrey Davies
marks the first ever English translation of this pivotal work... An
accessible, informative, and highly entertaining read."
*Banipal Magazine*
"...Leg over Leg by the Lebanese intellectual Ahmad Faris
al-Shidyaq, [has] long been held to be untranslatable and so [is]
appearing, in [its] entirety, in English for the first time."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"Al-Shidyaq, born in Lebanon in the early years of the nineteenth
century, was a Zelig of the Arabic literary world, and his Leg over
Leg is a bawdy, hilarious, epically word-obsessed, and
unclassifiable book, which has never been translated into English
before."
*Moby Lives*
"Humphrey Davies has rendered one of the most challenging texts of
Arabic literature, al-Shidyaq's al-Saq 'ala l-saq, accessible to a
wide range of readers for the first time.... The reader is plunged
into al-Shidyaq's critical, humorous, uninhibited, sometimes bitter
but profoundly humane, and utterly original masterpiece."
*Journal of the American Oriental Society*
"Humphrey Davies's translation, published in four dual-language
volumes, is a triumph. He skillfully renders punning, rhyming prose
without breaking the spell Leg over Leg stands out for both its
stylistic brazenness and the excellence of the translation. With
this bilingual edition, the Library of Arabic Literature helps fill
a large cultural gap and alters our view of Arabic literature and
the formal trajectory of the novel outside the West. Any reader for
whom the term 'world literature' is more than an empty platitude
must read Humphrey Davies's translation."
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
"We're having a particularly good season for literary discoveries
from the past, with recent publications of Volumes 1 and 2 of Ahmad
Faris al-Shidyaq's 'Leg over Leg' (1855)…"
*New York Times Book Review*
"It is not too early to state that the publication of this work, in
this edition, is a game-changer. This is a foundational work of
modern Arabic literature and its publication in English is long
overdue but given how it is presented here, it was perhaps worth
the wait. This edition, with helpful endnotes, the original Arabic
text, and in a translation that both reads well and appears to
closely mirror the original, seems, in almost every way, ideal. I
don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this is the most
important literary publication of a translation into English, in
terms of literary history and our understanding of it, in
years."
*The Complete Review*
"Humphrey Davies’ masterful translation of Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg
over Leg is the English-language reader’s first introduction to the
work of this foundational figure of Arabic letters. The protagonist
leaves his native Lebanon to make a life for himself elsewhere as
an itinerant scribe, poet, translator, editor, and author. This is
a book about books, about conventions of writing, reading,
bookmaking, cultural creation and crossings, bristling with puns
and long digressions about the “oddities of language, including its
rare words”—a preoccupation that makes Davies’ translation all the
more remarkable as a work of literature and scholarship both."
*American Literary Translators' Association*
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