{"id":13438,"date":"2015-07-15T08:01:54","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T12:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13438"},"modified":"2015-07-15T08:01:54","modified_gmt":"2015-07-15T12:01:54","slug":"many-many-works-of-wonder-beyond-the-classic-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/many-many-works-of-wonder-beyond-the-classic-classics\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Many, Many Works of Wonder\u2019: Beyond the Classic Classics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"download\"<\/a>via the always great Arabic Literature (in English)<\/strong>
\nBY MLYNXQUALEY on JULY 14, 2015 \u2022 ( 0 )<\/p>\n

The fifth session of \u201cA Corpus Not a Canon: A Workshop on the Library of Arabic Literature,\u201d a panel series hosted by Dame Marina Warner and LAL General Editor Philip Kennedy at All Souls College, Oxford in April, focused on \u201cLAL\u2019s remit, ambition, and complexity.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Philip Kennedy and Richard Sieburth led a discussion that included Humphrey Davies, Marilyn Booth, Robyn Creswell, and Roger Allen. The books in focus were Leg over Leg, by A\u1e25mad F\u0101ris al-Shidy\u0101q, edited and translated by Humphrey Davies; and What \u2018Isa Told Us, Or, A Period of Time, by Mu\u1e25ammad al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b, edited and translated by Roger Allen.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A discussion of this session will continue next week, insha\u2019allah.<\/p>\n

\u201cClassical Arabic literature\u201d usually evokes a Baghdad-centered Golden Age, a far-off period of poetry and sophisticated manners that\u2019s followed by an immense Dark Ages, only imperfectly lightened by the early twentieth century nahda, or renaissance. This framing of Arab and Islamic history was questioned explicitly during the LAL workshop\u2019s first session and implicitly during the fifth session. There, instead of a focus on Golden Age works as representative of the Library\u2019s \u201cremit, ambition, and complexity,\u201d workshop participants looked at two nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m delighted that LAL from the start has very much embraced the nineteenth century as part of its remit,\u201d Marilyn Booth said during her presentation, which focused mostly on al-Shidy\u0101q\u2019s Leg over Leg. \u201cI think that\u2019s really important. Right now, there\u2019s something of a nineteenth-century turn in modern literary studies of the Arab region, and also the Turkish and Persian regions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a time that, until recently, I think was seen as something of a dead letter,\u201d Booth said. \u201cAnd now that\u2019s changing. There are many, many works of wonder from that period to read and explore.\u201d<\/p>\n

But while the two works discussed during the fifth session share a time period, they\u2019re markedly different in construction and ambition. Leg over Leg attracted the majority of the discussants\u2019 attention and could, as Philip Kennedy noted, have been the focus of an entire day\u2019s workshop. The book, translated by Humphrey Davies and published in four volumes, is a major creative work that reads as relevant now as it did in 1855, challenging our ideas of modernity, literary influence, gender, and genre. Mu\u1e25ammad al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b\u2019s What \u2018Isa Told Us, or, A Period of Time, meanwhile, is a popular and influential collection of newspaper essays originally published in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Translator-editor Roger Allen called the two-volume set a \u201cbridge work,\u201d linking the earlier Arabic corpus with other, newer forms.<\/p>\n

Al-Shidy\u0101q\u2019s work, on the other hand, is almost certainly not a bridge; indeed, al-Shidy\u0101q challenges the idea of literary bridge-ness. But both writers were intellectuals connected to earlier forms as scholars and readers; both were familiar with European travels and literature; both were involved with newspapers and the new types of printing; both engaged Arab and European realities.<\/p>\n

The relationship with Europe<\/em><\/p>\n

Much of the attention to Leg over Leg has focused on its relationships with European texts, as indeed has been the case with other key Arabic texts, such as al-Ma\u02bfarr\u012b\u2019s Epistle of Forgiveness. But Creswell, in his presentation, said he was less interested in the search for European \u201csources\u201d for Leg over Leg. This search, he said, \u201cstrikes me as a way of mitigating the novel\u2019s essential strangeness.\u201d But he didn\u2019t forgo comparisons: He focused on a key formal difference between Leg over Leg and Sterne\u2019s Tristam Shandy, which was the manner of digression. In Tristam Shandy, he said, digressions are contextual, while in Leg over Leg, they\u2019re philological.<\/p>\n

Al-Shidy\u0101q, Creswell said, \u201cbecomes an intellectual by re-imagining the older profession of philologist. Rather than being a commentator on authorized texts, he makes himself into a commentator on the world around him.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, Creswell likened al-Shidy\u0101q to a later set of European writers: \u201cHe estranges his own language by opening it up to its own past. It is this task of renewing language by archaicizing it that makes for common ground between Shidy\u0101q and somewhat later European modernists like Pound and Yeats, who sought to make it new by making it old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b, who wrote half a century after al-Shidy\u0101q, had a different relationship with European texts, and his comments on European habits came through a filter of the British occupation of Egypt and as a participant in struggles over power and influence. Al-Shidy\u0101q, meanwhile, stood as an independent observer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are pages [of Leg over Leg] on England that sound almost like Engels on Manchester and the working class, published in 1845,\u201d Sieburth said. As for al-Shidy\u0101q\u2019s descriptions of Paris: \u201cI would use [them] in a \u2018representations of Paris in literature\u2019 course.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are bits of social history here, and discussions of, for example, the specificities of French latrines that I haven\u2019t found in Hugo or Balzac or the British travelers.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other ways, Al-Shidy\u0101q\u2019s work stands out from other nineteenth-century texts, or other literary works in general, Sieburth said: \u201cRarely have I read a work that is this profoundly corporeal, that is founded in the body of language. Its vocalizations, its sound structures. A body whose verbal flesh and blood and shit and sperm and farts and belches are physically inscribed on the page in a form of lists and lexicographical riffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b showed a greater anxiety about European opinion. Al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b\u2019s description of Paris, which was removed from the \u201cschool-ready\u201d editions of his book, show a prudishness that\u2019s foreign to Leg over Leg. In this section, al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b describes the Egypt exhibit at a Paris fair, which he finds full of \u201clewd women\u201d and gaming. \u201cWhen we got inside, we almost died of shock.\u201d This sort of exhibit, al-Muwayli\u1e25\u012b wrote, \u201conly served to make other people look down on Egypt with contempt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two texts offer different visions of Europe\u2014one more independent, and one that became an \u201cofficial\u201d view, stamped with the approval of becoming a school-exam text.<\/p>\n

The tradition and untranslatability<\/em><\/p>\n

Booth and Creswell both called Leg over Leg a blueprint for LAL\u2019s remit. One of the senses in which it functions as a guide is in its apparent \u201cuntranslatability.\u201d As Kennedy noted, \u201cIf there are works that fit into that scheme [of untranslatability], then certainly Al-Saq \u2018ala al-Saq [Leg over Leg] is one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Davies, along with his project editor Michael Cooperson, made his heroic job seem possible. \u201cMy task as a translator was resolutely focused on breaking it down into discrete tasks and tackling them one by one.\u201d<\/p>\n

As in much of classical Arabic literature, rhymed prose was an issue. But in Leg over Leg, Davies said, it was even more important that the translator embrace this challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cShidy\u0101q was very self-conscious about the fact that he was using rhymed prose, and he didn\u2019t allow the reader to forget it. At one point he says, \u2018Rhymed prose is to the writer as a wooden leg to the walker. I must be careful, then, not to rest all my weight on it every time I go for a stroll down the highways of literary expression, lest its vagaries end up cramping my style or it tosses me into a pothole from which I cannot crawl.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is impossible, clearly, for the translator to skirt the issue,\u201d Davies said. \u201cSo I had to sit down and do as much as I could in the way of simple rhyming.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, the \u201cuntranslatable\u201d Mt. Everest of Leg over Leg ended up being translatable after all. The rhyming worked so well, Davies said, that he wondered \u201cif we could work through this series to reintroduce the use of rhymed prose in English.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davies shared, as part of his presentation, a satiric poem that was part of Leg over Leg, composed in the style of slavish admiration to the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali. The poem was written on the occasion of the ruler having his body shaved.<\/p>\n

\n

Time\u2019s lips parted to reveal a radiant feat,
\nThe day our prince took a bath and was rendered depilate.
\nHis noble nether parts thus appeared less hoary
\nAnd poetry, through his pubes, gained in glory.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s fun to do, and it\u2019s worth trying,\u201d Davies said. \u201cAnd sometimes it works.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previous sessions:<\/em><\/p>\n

A Comparative Balancing Act: Arabic Literature Is from Mars, English Literature from Venus
\nRe-membering: How to Assemble a Corpus of Classical Arabic Literature
\nGenre, Anxiety, and the Plurivocality of the Arabic Tradition
\nEditing Classical Arabic Texts: It\u2019s Not Just Making Buggy Whips<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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