Impostures. al-Ḥarīrī
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only use them when i m played out
like tonight when i crashed the gate
i gave you memories at least to laugh about
Now Abuzeid said good-bye, lighting a fire, an ember burning through his heart.
Notes
The original is called al-Kūfiyyah, “Of Kufah,” referring to the Iraqi city, but also to the Imposture of that name composed by al-Ḥarīrī’s predecessor al-Hamadhānī. For a comparison of the two see Kennedy, Recognition, 262.
“Sahban” in §5.1 is Saḥbān, a proverbially famous orator, apparently a contemporary of the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd I (r. 86–96/705–15), but otherwise practically unknown as a historical figure (see Fahd, “Saḥbān”). Philip Kennedy suggests that in the companions’ assumption of superiority to Sahban is “a warning about rash inadvertence” (Recognition, 261) especially in view of how the episode ends.
Abū Zayd’s poem in §5.2 consists of half-length lines with a single rhyme. The rhyme is double r, which allows him to use a number of unusual verbs that to my mind produce a comical effect. To approximate it, the translation uses a very constrained English light-verse form, the double dactyl—actually, two double dactyls. This form consists of two stanzas of four lines each; the first three must be in dactylic dimeter and the fourth a single choriamb. The first line of the first stanza must be nonsense and the third line of the second stanza must be a single word. (I have ignored an optional constraint, which is that the second line should mention only the subject of the poem.) My use of the form is slightly anachronistic, as it was invented (by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal) in 1951, ten years after Woolf’s death.
Section §5.5 contains the first of many allusions to the story of Moses (for an analysis of which see Kennedy, Recognition, 267–70, 272, 276). For “the mother of Moses” I have supplied Jochebed, from Exodus 6:20 and Numbers 26:59. The name does not appear in al-Ḥarīrī’s Arabic or in the Qurʾanic tellings of the Moses story. But using it allowed me to avoid the awkward “the heart of the mother of Moses” in English.
The English of the poem in §5.7 is based on the form of Arthur Guiterman’s “Philadelphia,” from The Lyric Baedeker (1918), cited in Hollander, American Wits, 7–9.
Regarding the relationship between Abū Zayd and his son (whom we may for convenience call Zayd), Abdelfattah Kilito has argued that Zayd’s insistence that he owes nothing to his father parallels al-Ḥarīrī’s wish to do away with his figurative father—namely, al-Hamadhānī, author of the first Impostures (al-Ghāʾib, 46–47). Katia Zakharia argues rather that the attenuated relationship between Abū Zayd and his son amounts to an argument for the superiority of another kind of relationship, that of teacher and disciple (Abū Zayd, 171–79).
I have taken the phrase “hind-locks grew grey in the dawn” (§5.9) from Chenery, Assemblies, 131. “Cash” does not appear in Mrs. Dalloway, but the OED dates it to 1811.
In later episodes, Abū Zayd will appear with a wife and a son—or, at least, with women and children identified as such. His claim here that “barrah s made up and so is zayd” (§5.10) is, therefore, no more believable than anything else he says. The English form of the poem is based on that of the third stanza of Don Marquis’s “mehitabel s extensive past,” from archy and mehitabel (1927), cited in Hollander, American Wits, 22. In Marquis’s work, the use of lowercase letters follows from the conceit that the poems are the work of a cockroach who cannot reach the shift key while typing letters (Hollander, American Wits, xxiii). “Kumayt” is al-Kumayt (d. 176/743), a poet renowned for praising both the Umayyads and the Alids—an odd choice, as the two great political families were deadly enemies.
Bibliography
“Double Dactyl.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl.
Fahd, T. “Saḥbān Wāʿil.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2007.
Hollander, John, ed. American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse. [New York]: Library of America, 2003.
Kennedy, Philip F. Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition: Discovery, Deliverance, and Delusion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Kilito, Abdelfattah. Al-Ghāʾib: Dirāsah fī maqāmah li l-Ḥarīrī. Casablanca: Tubqāl, 1987.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 1925. Full text at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200991.txt.
Imposture 6
Plain Anglish
This Imposture is the first of several that require Abū Zayd to produce a piece of constrained speech or writing. Here the challenge is to compose a petition in which every second word consists of letters written with dots, and the remaining words of letters written without dots. (He fudges on the feminine ending -ah, which he counts as undotted, as it often is in manuscripts.) To produce something comparable, the translation takes the two largest groups of English words, those of Germanic and those of Romance origin, and uses them in alternation. This constraint produces a language comparable to al-Ḥarīrī’s: meaningful, but odd-sounding. The prose narration, which in the original is constrained by rhyme, in English uses only words of Germanic derivation.
6.1Harald Hammamson told this tale:
Once, having hied to the moot in Maraaghah, I fell upon a gathering where the talk was all of speechcraft. Reed-reeves and tongue-wielders were grumbling that no living wight could trim the lore’s unruly bough, or twist words about his finger as eretide-folk once did. Could anyone (they asked) still blaze untrodden word-ways, or hammer out a leaf-writ that forbad being twinned? No, they whined: no reed-reeve of latter days, not even a cunning one with Sahbaan’s tongue in his head and show-speech’s reins in his hands, could do better than tear a leaf out of his elders’ book.
6.2Sitting on the crowd’s ragged edge, amid the hangers-on, was a man of middle years. He was sitting hunkered down, as if nocking an arrow or gathering himself to strike. Whenever a mooter overshot the mark, or drew from wit’s carry-bag a palm-apple that seemed withered, the outsider looked at him asquint and lifted his nose in scorn. At last, when the speakers had emptied their quivers, a stillness fell where once the winds had roared. Then the man pounced.