J.J. Phillips brought this remarkable text to our attention. Here is an excerpt from her letter:Andrei, I’m sending you a few brief excerpts from the 17th century Egyptian satirist Yusuf al Shirbini’s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded (pub. by Peeters, a Belgian academic house). It was translated by Humphrey Davies, an old running buddy, beloved friend (a Brit now living in Cairo), a highly respected, prizewinning translator of Arabic literature, primarily contemporary Egyptian fiction. I think you might find this quite compelling. Brains Confounded... is truly insane (the title alone tells you that), brilliantly insane, and parts of it are written in Egyptian Colloquial. (Humphrey’s one of only a handful of people fluent in 17th century Egyptian Colloquial.) It’s outrageously transgressive, blasphemous, and anti-PC with a vengeance. Rushdie’s a piker compared to Shirbini, who, unlike Rushdie, was defending the religious and cultural establishment of his day; and it’s apparent that Shirbini revels in being outrageous and disgusting in general. It is also, not paradoxically (unless one is a rank dualist), a marvelous text, written by a man who, whatever his personal politics, revels as much in the delights of the intellect and of language and linguistic precision as he does in flights of absurd fancy, crudity, funk, and buffoonery. All this shines through in the translation and accompanying notes.
It’s a book that begs for a wider audience, not only for those with a taste for the weird and crazy, for perverse satire, and scatologists; but it offers a veritable deluge of fascinating information for social critics, cultural anthropologists, folklorists, historians, Middle Eastern scholars, theologians, linguists, and others.
The attachment consists of a selection of verses that Humphrey sent me. But the book isn’t composed solely of these kinds of verses; there’s much, much more, including crazy linguistic disquisitions (sometimes spurious, sometimes not, in fact on every level the question of what’s spurious and what’s not pervades the text – so postmodern), a magnificent annotated catalog of farts, all kinds of folktales and folklore, many riffs on Alf Layla wa Layla, Arab poetry, theology, food, eating habits, sex habits, dress, you name it. I’d urge you to go out and buy the book except that the English translation alone (there are two more volumes, v. 1 the Arabic text, v. 3 a lexicon, all meticulously annotated) is obscenely expensive, thanks to the self-sabotaging, anal-retentive Belgian publisher. May the director of Peeters be sodomized by one of his country’s fabled Belgian pommes frites for his crimes against the democratization of knowledge. It’s a shame because I doubt even that many college and university libraries would spring for it, even though they should. However, Humphrey’s hoping that there will be a cheaper edition (from another publisher) sometime in the future. Here’s a link that'll give you some background info.
http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-brains-confounded-by-the-ode-of-abu-shaduf-expounded . More can be found on the Internet. Humphrey is also working on a translation of Leg Over Leg, a book by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a 19th century writer (to be published by NYU), which also contains wild pre-postmodernist craziness. http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/arabic-literature-found-in-translation. Excerpts from his might also be something for The Corpse, but for now I want to let you know about Shirbini.
