Leg over Leg: Volumes Three and Four

NOTES

1 “these twenty-eight letters”: i.e., of the Arabic alphabet.

2 “venereal disease, for which our noble language has no word” (al-dāʾ al-zarnabī mimmā khalat ʿanhu lughatunā l-sharīfah): the adjective zarnabī (from zarnab “vulva”) is probably the author’s coinage, though not one that was adopted (the current term for “venereal” is zuharī), and the specific disease he had in mind is probably syphilis, introduced from the New World, hence absent from the classical lexicon. The disease was rampant in Egypt from at least the time of the visit of the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi in the seventeenth century (Dankoff, “Ayıp değil!”). In the nineteenth century, terms for syphilis appear to have included al-tashwīsh (Spiro, Arabic-English Vocabulary, where it is defined as “sickness, illness, venereal disease”), which the author may have regarded as not belonging to the true Arab lexicon since it appears in the classical dictionaries only in the sense of “confusion” (the semantic progression being from “confusion” to “disorder, sickness” to (perhaps as a euphemism) “venereal disease”) and in the colloquial as al-ʿaya (= al-ʿayāʾ) al-afranjī (“the Frankish disease”) (Spiro, Arabic-English Vocabulary).

3 “the author like me of lunatics” (al-muʾallifu mithlī mina l-majānīn): up to the word al-majānīn, the sentence may be understood as meaning “the author, like me a lunatic,” with min as a partitive; thereafter it reveals itself as parallel to the preceding clauses.

4 “the farter” (al-khaḍfā), etc.: the following adjectives are vowelled in the Arabic as though feminine, perhaps implying intensification of the insult; however, it is also possible that the vowelling is in error for the masculine intensive form fiʿillā (cf., e.g., in the Qāmūs, “khibbiqā on the pattern of zimikkā”).

5 Cf. Mal. 2:10: “Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?”

6 Ps. 133:1–2.

7 “prize” (maghnam): i.e., marriage.

8 “to ‘ties of kinship’ is applied” (ʿalā l-ansābi nṭabaqat): this is an extended sense of arḥām.

9 “you Orientals… the Occidentals”: (minkum fī l-sharq… ahl al-gharb): probably meaning “any two groups of people from different parts of the world” (cf., e.g., mashāriq al-arḍ wa-maghāribuhā, “the entire world”).

10 The merchant’s last name was al-Ṣūlī, he was a Catholic from Damascus, and his daughter’s name was Wardah (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 1:82).

11 “it was not to be imagined that anyone else could have been exhibited to her”: i.e., the girl’s family was too respectable to have allowed her to meet any other man.

12 “the ‘twisting of the side-tresses’” (al-haṣr bi-l-fawdayn): the reference is to the muʿallaqah (“suspended ode”) which, in this version (other versions have a different first hemistich), reads haṣartu bi-faw-day raʾsihā fa-tamāyalat * ʿalayya haḍīma l-kashḥi rayyā l-mukhalkhali (“I twisted her side-tresses to me, and she leaned over me; slender-waisted she was, and tenderly plump her ankles”) (translation: Arberry, Seven Odes, 63).

13 Prov. 5:19.

14 I.e., in chapter 7 of Volume One.

15 “regarded their wives as chattel” (kāna ḍayzanan lahu ʿalā l-māʾidah): literally, “wanted too much of their share at table,” to be understood in the context of the contrasting phrase below (3.2.7): “no man will jostle me for her affections” (wa-lā yuzāḥimunī fīhā l-rijāl).

16 “shifts would be ripped from in front and from the rear” (wa-qudda l-qamīṣāni min qubulin wa-min dubur): an echo of Q Yūsuf 12:25, 28 wa-qaddat qamīsahu min duburin… fa-lammā raʾā qamīṣahu qudda min duburin “she tore his shirt at the back…. When he saw his shirt was torn from the rear….”

17 Located at the end of this chapter.

18 “My shaft… your luckless stick” (qidḥī… qidḥuka l-safīḥ): qidḥ may be taken to mean “horse,” thus extending the metaphor of the preceding line, or “arrow-shaft” (as used in the ancient Arabian gambling game of maysar), a possibility strengthened by the use of the term safīḥ, meaning “an arrow-shaft used in maysar that has no good luck” (Qāmūs).

19 “single verses” (abyāt mufradah): i.e., of self-contained, one-line (two-hemistich) unrhymed poems.

20 “Some count among this last kind the sarābātiyyah” etc: meaning, perhaps, that latrine cleaners are held up by some (presumably sarcastically) as examples of people so devoted to their fellow men that they will collect their night soil, while others see them merely as persons who have to earn a living.

21 “a sun…”: mahāt means both “sun” and “female oryx”; thus the meaning is that separation from the beloved does not result in her being seen simply as a beautiful object, but rather makes the lover’s feelings more intense.

22 “of her and of me”: perhaps because in so doing the grateful lover would give precedence to the beloved for his happiness, thus fitting the conceit more closely to the sense of the preceding passage.

23 “something else that comes from her”: ʿadhirah (with identical ductus to ʿadhrah) means “feces.”

24 “who suffers from diochism” (bihi sīfanniyyah): see the author’s note that follows, which refers to the bird itself, the sīfannah; the allusion may be to the dioch (Quelea quelea), a bird that forms flocks of thousands and is known to strip trees entirely; though not found now in Egypt, the dioch is common in Sudan and the reference in the note to Egypt may be loose.

25 “the two honey-seekers” (al-mustaʿsilayn): or, punningly, “the two seekers after intercourse” (see 3.2.11).

26 “Reproach me not, for reproach is a spur” (daʿ ʿanka lawmī fa-inna l-lawma ighrāʾū): Abū Nuwās, Dīwān, 7.

27 “this manifest victory” (hādhā l-fatḥ al-mubīn): a Qurʾanic reference (Q Fatḥ 48:1) but capable also of being read as “this demonstrated opening.”

28 “The Two Titter-Making Poems” (al-qaṣīdatān al-ṭīkhiyyatān): one likely reason for the author’s calling them by this name is to be found in the third and fourth lines, where much of the vocabulary used is open to two interpretations, one respectable (and to be found in the dictionaries) and the other vulgar (and primarily vernacular). Thus, in line 3, muzabbiban, according to the definition of the Qāmūs which the author is at pains to reproduce in a marginal note, means “talking too much” or “having the sides of his mouth filled with saliva”; most readers, however, will immediately relate the word to zubb, meaning “penis,” so that it might be interpreted as “touching my penis”; similarly, mutakassisan, again according to the marginal note quoting the Qāmūs, means “putting on airs,” whereas most readers will be reminded of kuss (“cunt”), thus allowing a reading of “cunt-obsessed.” In the same vein, the two following words (mustaqbilan mustadbiran) might be understood as “approaching from the front, approaching from the rear.” Similarly, in the next line, tajmīsh, which the Qāmūs defines as “flirting” (al-mughāzalah), commonly occurs in Abbasid poetry in the sense of “(sexually) groping, fondling.” Another feature that might be perceived as “strange” (see 3.2.9) is the piling up of unusual lexical items in lists, a feature carried over by the author from the prose passages of the book.

29 “A jinni-possessed poet” (shāʿir dhū jinnah): the belief that poets were inspired by jinnis was widespread in pre-Islamic Arabia.

30 “my two little friends” (ṣuwayḥibayya): i.e., his poetic familiars.

31 “Ask her, ‘Does the oven burn hot as it should/Each month, or is it late some months?’”: meaning “Is she not, despite her pretensions to glory, a mere woman who menstruates and gets pregnant?”

32 “He-of-the-Two-Horns” (Dhū l-Qarnayn): an epithet of Alexander the Great.

33 I.e., the beloved.

34 “Yūsuf… prison”: in Islam, Yūsuf (biblical Joseph) represents young male beauty and virtue; according to the Qurʾan, Yūsuf was imprisoned when falsely accused of assault by Pharaoh’s wife (Q Yūsuf 12:35 and passim).

35 Rashā: poetic license for Rashaʾ, which, in addition to being a female given name, means “young gazelle.”

36 Suʿād: a woman’s name often given the beloved by poets (mostly famously by Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr in the opening line of a poem dedicated to the Prophet Muḥammad); thus the author asks in effect, “Who is this Suʿād? It is you who are the true angel?” etc.

37 See Volume One, 1.13.10.

38 “thrusting the soles of his feet toward the face of the person sitting with him”: it is considered insulting to deliberately show the soles of one’s shoes.

39 “Fulān shamma l-narjisa wa-ḥabaq” etc.: these appear to be distorted versions of the saying man sabaq shamma l-ḥabaq (“he who arrives first, smells the basil,” i.e., “the early bird catches the worm”) that exploit the shared senses of ḥabaq as “basil” and “he farted”; Franks would, presumably, be ignorant of the saying itself and a fortiori be oblivious to the grammatical and semantic solecisms.

40 The Thistle and the Cedar of Lebanon by Habeeb Risk Allah (Ḥabīb Rizqallah) (London, first edition 1843, second edition 1853) includes a description of feasts (pp. 28–33), not a wedding, that he attended in Damascus at which poems such as that quoted would sometimes end the festivities. Risk Allah glosses “feast” as faraḥ, a word used colloquially to mean “wedding,” which may explain al-Shidyāq’s confusion. While it would obviously be regarded as ill-omened to sing a funeral lament at a wedding, it might have been more acceptable at a party at which the arts were on display, and it remains an open question whether al-Shidyāq’s criticism was reasonable or deliberate obfuscation. The verses form the second stanza of the longer poem quoted by Risk Allah, and in Risk Allah’s version go, “Tell me, O Grave, tell me, is her incomparable beauty gone? Has she, too, faded as the petals fall from the sweetest flower, and her lovely face changed — changed and gone! Thou art not a garden, O Grave; nor yet heaven; still all the fairest flowers and brightest plants are culled by thee”; similar verses are quoted anonymously in ʿAbbās b. Muḥammad al-Qurashī, Ḥamāsat al-Qurashī (ed. Khayr al-Dīn Maḥmūd Qablāwī, Damascus: Manshūrāt Wizārat al-Thaqāfah, 1995), 245, no. 78.

41 “two assemblies, one for the common people and another for the elite” (majlisayni aḥaduhumā ʿāmmiyyūna wa-aḥaduhumā khāṣṣī): the account of the assembly for the common people is written in colloquial Arabic.

42 “transmitter of poetry” (rāwī): premodern Arabic poetry was passed from generation to generation orally via persons who preserved and recited a poet’s works and taught them to others.

43 “smacks to the back of the neck” (al-ṣafʿ): to slap oneself on the back of the neck (or the cheeks) is a ritual expression of mourning.

44 “his anterior and his posterior” (quddāmuhu wa-khalfuhu): probably an allusion to his “pantaloons that are big both in front and behind” (sarwīlātuhu l-mufarsakhah) above (3.3.8).

45 Perhaps a reference to Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), brought to the Ottoman Empire by Jews expelled from al-Andalus at the end of the fifteenth century.

46 “from the furthest west and… from the further east” (min aqṣā l-maghrib… min aqṣā l-mashriq): i.e., from Morocco and from Iraq.

47 “the emir of al-Quffah”: either the emir of a place called al-Quffah (unidentified) or “the emir of the basket,” in which case the reference is equally obscure.

48 “in this case”: i.e., in the case of the display of the bride’s blood, which the author treats as an exercise in rubbing the beholders’ noses in the groom’s good luck at having married a virgin, or perhaps at having married at all.

49 “testing for virginity leads mostly to sterility” (al-ʿuqru yakūnu ghāliban sababan fī l-ʿuqr): the definition used in the translation of the author’s note (“the exploration…”) is taken from Lane’s Lexicon (s.v. ʿuqr); Lane comments, “Perhaps it is a meaning inferred from… bayḍat al-ʿuqr [meaning] ‘That [egg] with which a woman is tested on the occasion of devirgination.’”

50 “penetration” (baṣīrah): punning on the two meanings of the word, i.e., “insight, acumen” and “bloody proof.”

51 “the baker’s oven flared up, the heated pot boiled over” (qad fāra l-tannūr wa-fāḍa l-masjūr): i.e., the bride was menstruating.

52 “to the Island of the Foul of Breath” (jazīrat al-bukhr) etc.: i.e., Malta (see Volume Two, 2.3.16 and below, 3.11.2).

53 “dream interpreter” (muʿabbir li-l-aḥlām): the author was in fact engaged by the Church Missionary Society, for whom he was already working in Cairo as a teacher, to go to Malta in the capacity of a translator (Roper, Fāris al-Shidyāq as Translator and Editor). The non-figurative key to the ironic substitution of dream interpretation for translation lies in the fact that while the root ʿ-b-r means “to interpret (dreams),” reversal of the second two consonants results in ʿ-r-b, from which taʿrīb “to translate into Arabic.” The author has already in this work (Volume One, 0.2.3) shown his interest in metathesis and later was to write a book—Sirr al-layāl fī l-qalb wa-l-ibdāl (The Secrets of Morphology and Metathesis, 1884) — devoted to this form of word play.

54 “a man is tied by his tongue” (al-rajulu yurbaṭu bi-lisānihi): i.e., a man must honor his word.

55 “make for the back of that Friend of God” (yaqṣidna ẓahra hādhā l-walī): i.e., go for a boat ride; the speaker likens the sea to one of God’s chosen “friends” among men, to whom He grants the power to perform wonders.

56 “the two sweetest things” (al-aʿdhabayn): i.e., food and coitus.

57 “He had triumphed and succeeded — and with what triumph and what success!”: presumably meaning that he felt that his sexual performance on what was in effect his honeymoon had been more than adequate.

58 “the fire-ship” (safīnat al-nār): i.e., the steamer; the implications of the Arabic term are the topic of further discussion below (3.5.6).

59 “Angering Women Who Dart Sideways Looks, and Claws like Hooks”: i.e., Volume One, chapter 10, where the author says, for example, “if [women] set their hearts on reading, who knows where it will end?” (1.10.10)

60 “the al-” (al-alif wa-l-lām): i.e., the Arabic article, often translatable as “the.”

61 “generic or referential” (al-jinsī aw al-dhihnī): i.e., whether the poet meant that the beloved’s rump was incapable of passing through any door or only of passing through some specific door that was in the mind of the poet and his readers.

62 Imam al-Zawzanī: al-Ḥusayn ibn Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Zawzanī (d. 468/1093), a noted philologist and man of letters best known for his commentary on the seven “suspended odes,” entitled Sharḥ al-qaṣāʾid (or al-muʿallaqāt) al-sabʿ.

63 “for a man’s eye, despite its small size” (fa-ʾinna ʿayna bni ʾādama maʿa kawnihā ḍayyiqah): also, punningly, in allusion to the Lebanese idiom ʿēnu ḍayyiqah, “for a man, despite the limitations of his imagination.”

64 “six-letter verbs…” (al-afʿāl al-sudāsiyyah…): by “six-letter verbs” the author means those called in English-language grammars of Arabic “Form X verbs,” which are formed by prefixing to the three root consonants the three-letter formative element ist-, which, as a substantive, means “anus”; Form X verbs may “express the taking, seeking, asking for, or demanding, what is meant by the first [form]” (e.g., istaghfara “to ask pardon”), as also that “a person thinks that a certain thing possesses… the quality expressed by the first form” (e.g., istathqala “to find (s.th.) heavy”) (Wright, Grammar, I:44, 45).

65 “‘bearing,’ as some poets would have it” (ḥāmilah kamā dhahaba ilayhi baʿḍu l-shuʿarāʾ): no description in poetry of the posterior as “bearing” has been found.

66 “the Most Beauteous Names” (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā): the names, or epithets, of God, e.g., “the Satisfier of All Needs,” “the Opener,” “the Patient,” etc.

67 “they encompass both front and back” (maʿa ḥtiwāʾihimā ʿalā l-qubuli wa-l-dubur): i.e., “even though the anus and the vagina, in animals, are located in close proximity to one another between the buttocks.”

68 “what is concave” (al-mujawwaf): perhaps meaning the small of the back.

69 Al-Ḥusayn ibn Aḥmad ibn Khālawayh (d. 370/980–81) was a leading philologist of Baghdad. The reference is to his work Laysa fī kalām al-ʿArab (Not to Be Found in the Speech of the Arabs) (p. 267); Ibn Khālawayh does not otherwise gloss al-ṣawfaqatān and the word is not to be found in the lexica.

70 mirfad: “the bustle by which a flat-buttocked woman enlarges herself” (Lisān).

71 “no matter how you switch them around, they’ll give you a new meaning each time” (kayfamā qalabtahā ẓahara laka minhā ayḍan maʿnā): i.e., the consonants d-b-r that form dubur (“backside”) may be arranged in different combinations to produce new words (e.g., radb [“dead-end road”], rabada [“to erect”], badr [“full moon; beautiful girl or boy”], bard [“cold”]).

72 “according to their numerical values” (bi-ḥisāb al-jummal): i.e., according to the counting system that allots a numerical value to each letter of the Arabic alphabet; dubr yields the values 4 (d), 2 (b), and 200 (r), any two of which add up, of course, to an even number.

73 “the two ‘u’s imply ponderousness and gravity” (al-ḍammatayni ishāratun ilā l-thiqal wa-l-razānah): the ḍammah or “u,” as in dubur, is conventionally described as a “heavy vowel” (ḥarakah thaqīlah); the author exploits the literal sense of the terminology.

74 “at the end of the month” (dubura l-shahr): dubura is simply a noun used as a preposition and it makes no sense, as the author knows, to posit it as the etymon of the noun (Wright, Grammar, I:280 [357]).

75 “the question of its derivation from ‘the afterpart of anything’” (al-khilāfu fī shtiqāqihā min ʿaqibi l-shayʾ): the author appears to willfully misunderstand the formulation that he has quoted earlier from the Qāmūs (see 3.5.13, last sentence), where the words wa-min kulli shayʾin ʿaqibuhu (literally, “and [al-dubr and al-dubur also] mean ‘the afterpart… of anything’”), as though the lexicographer had written wa-l-dubr wa-l-dubur min ʿaqibi l-shayʾ (“al-dubr and al-dubur are [derived] from the ʿaqib of anything”), which is, of course, nonsense, but of a piece with his reasoning concerning dubura l-shayʾ (see preceding endnote).

76 “they [would certainly] turn their backs” ([la-]wallawu l-adbāra): cf. Q Fatḥ 48:22.

77 On Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī and Al-Ḥakākah fī l-rakākah, see Volume Two, 2.3.5 and 2.9.3; this volume, chapter 20; and Volume Four, chapter 19.

78 “Raising a Storm” (Fī Ithārat al-Riyāḥ): i.e., Volume One, chapter 1 (see 1.1.6., pp. 45–47).

79 Umm Suwayd, Umm al-ʿIzm, and Umm Khinnawr: epithets (i.e., kunyas, or descriptive labels consisting of either abū (“father of”) or umm (“mother of”), in the sense of “possessed of,” followed by a noun) are often nontransparent or ambiguous; thus Umm Suwayd might be translated as “Mother of a Little Black Thing,” Umm al-ʿIzm has no clear meaning, and Umm Khinnawr may denote “Mother of a Hyena,” or “of a Cow,” etc.

80 “had they not held it in the same esteem” etc.: i.e., since the Arabs typically allocated heroic descriptive epithets to lions, etc. and since they did the same for the backside, they must have viewed them as being on a par.

81 “a possessor of Umm Suwayd” (umm Umm Suwayd): i.e., a woman, which the cat resembles in its fertility, playfulness, etc.

82 “or that they may be used as a means to get hold of one” (aw annahā takūnu dharīʿatan lahā): i.e., as a go-between with access to women’s quarters, a common theme in Arabic romances and one to which the author refers again below (3.15.4).

83 “another book”: unidentified.

84 “the massively uddered”: thus the Qāmūs (al-ʿaẓīmatu l-ḍarʿ), though the word seems out of place in this list.

85 balkhāʾ: feminine singular of bilākh.

86 Most of the words in the following table were cited in an earlier list (Volume Two, 2.14.8ff.).

87 “this custom” (hādhihi l-ʿādah): i.e., that of a woman’s turning her backside toward her husband (see 3.5.7 above).

88 “the city”: Valletta.

89 “Steven”: probably William Stevens, a notary and solicitor, who worked in Valletta from 1803 to his death in 1854, when he left behind him six sons and seven daughters (see 3.6.5 below); he lived at Pieta, which would have been most easily reached from the Marsamxett side of Valletta, where the author and his wife were staying, by boat; one of William’s sons — William John — also worked in Malta from 1831 to 1878 but his place of residence does not fit the author’s description (personal communication from Dr. Simon Mercieca, University of Malta). That Stevens was a lawyer explains the author’s apparently mocking allusions to him by the Islamic terms faqīh (“jurisprudent”) and (3.6.2 below) faraḍī (“expert on the division of inheritances”).

90 “in Across the Sea” (fī ʿIbra l-Baḥr): the odd wording may reflect the Maltese expression jaqsam il-baħar (“to cross the sea”), used of crossing either of the two harbors that flank Valletta (personal communication from Dr. Simon Mercieca, University of Malta); if that is the case, the author seems to have mistaken the phrase for a place-name.

91 “for both orientation and osculation” (fī l-qiblah wa-l-qublah): i.e., by virtue of having the qiblah (the place — Mecca — to which Muslims direct themselves in prayer) in their lands and by virtue of their excellence in kissing.

92 “the same downfall had befallen them as befell the Barāmikah” (nazala bihinna nakbatu l-barāmikah): the Barāmikah family held high office at the court of the early Abbasid caliphs and became known for the extravagance of their lifestyle. In 187/803, they were imprisoned and had their possessions confiscated by Hārūn al-Rashīd.

93 “khawals”: Lane calls these “dancing-men” (see Lane, Description, 381–82).

94 “The Fāriyāq went on” (qāla): many of the Fāriyāq’s discussions with his wife begin by being reported in the third person (i.e., putatively by the author) and shift to being reported in the first person by the Fāriyāq himself.

95 The final word in the author’s note does not in fact occur in the text.

96 “the protuberance of her two breasts and their perkiness…” (burūz al-nahdayni wa-nuhūduhumā…): the following list of words related to breasts is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter, using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

97 saʿdān: a creeping desert plant, Neurada procumbens, that has conical prickles.

98 “ra…”: the first syllable of the word rajīm (“the lapidated”), which follows al-shayṭān in the pious formula aʿūdhu bi-llāhi mina l-shayṭān al-rajīm, and also of rajul meaning “man”; in the following sentence, reference is to the phrase bi-smi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm (“In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate”).

99 “and the fact of his being strong and hard” (wa-kawnuhu qawiyyan shadīdan): the following list of words related to being strong and being hard is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter, using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

100 “al-Suyūṭī… suits… sots” (al-Suyūṭī… al-sawṭiyyīn… al-miswaṭiyyīn): the Fāriyāqiyyah believes that the name al-Suyūṭī (“from al-Asyūṭ,” referring to the town in Upper Egypt) is related to the word sawṭ meaning “whip” and the Fāriyāq carries the joke further by invoking a further related word, miswaṭ, meaning the same; this purely phonetic play has been realized here in a different form.

101 “splitting it into hemistichs and inserting between them others of her own or building new stanzas based on what I’ve already written” (shaṭṭarathu wa-khammasathu): tashṭīr and takhmīs are practices by which existing, usually well-known, poems are expanded by a later poet; tashṭīr, strictly interpreted, consists of inserting a new hemistich after the first and before the second hemistich of the original, resulting in two lines where before there was one; takhmīs consists of the “expansion of a given poem into a strophic poem of five-line stanzas in which the last two lines consist of one line (two hemistichs) from the original poem, and the three new lines at the beginning rhyme with the first hemistich” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, I:82).

102 “Postscript” (ḥāshiyah): Having exhausted the resources available to him (see n. 95, above), the translator is unable to provide equivalents for the further ninety-seven synonyms for “strong and vigorous” and “hard and tough” listed here and invites readers to read the transcribed Arabic to themselves and experience its purely phonic aspects; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

103 “scraps of paper… scrap of food” (ṣaḥfatun min ṣuḥufi ṭ-ṭaʿām): the double entendre depends in the Arabic on the fact that ṣuḥuf may be used as the plural of both ṣaḥīfah (“leaf, page”) and ṣaḥfah (“large eating bowl”).

104 “the head of the Chamber” (raʾīs al-muʿabbar): i.e., Christoph Schlienz, a German missionary recruited by the Church Missionary Society soon before the author’s first visit to Malta and to whom he had, during that stay, taught Arabic (Roper, Fāris al-Shidyāq as Translator and Editor). “In 1838 Schlienz was hit on the head by a barge-pole while in Egypt, which rendered him intermittently insane for the next three or more years. In December 1841 he suffered a particularly bad relapse. This took the form of an insistence on undressing and walking naked in the street, so that he had to be forcibly re-dressed. This incident was recorded in a report now in the CMS archives” (personal communication from Geoffrey Roper). The incident is described in chapter 17 below.

105 “The rest of the dream is self-explanatory”: the author hints that the wife retained two lovers (two “branches”) and returns to this theme later (3.14.5 and 3.15 passim).

106 kuʿkubbah: this almost comically strange-sounding word is defined in the Qāmūs as “four lengths of hair braided so that they intertwine with one another.”

107 “wipe her nose” (yuraʿʿimahā): exactly what is implied here is unclear, but see the author’s comments on the same word below (3.12.21, wa-lā turaʿʿimuhu, sixth item in table).

108 “figure 2… two strokes” (ʿadada thnayn): i.e., she wrote the Arabic figure , which consists of a lateral stroke and a vertical stroke; when the first is removed, something resembling a figure is left.

109 “rafḍ… farḍ… ʿirḍ… ʿarḍ”: i.e., if the husband substitutes refusal (rafḍ) for religious duty (farḍ), his wife will trade in her honor as a woman (ʿirḍ) for the exposure (ʿarḍ) of his failure as a man.

110 “its circularity”: the idea of the repetition of worldly events (such as the rise and fall of nations) over time is a well-established trope.

111 “figure 3… two teeth… a crooked figure 1” (ʿadada thalāthatin… sinnayn… wāḥidan dhā ʿawaj): as with the “figure 2” above, except that the lateral stroke of the Arabic figure 3 () consists of two joined “teeth,” or small peaks.

112 “a people with breath so foul” etc.: the author says earlier of the inhabitants of the island (i.e., the Maltese) that “they speak a language so filthy, dirty, and rotten that the speaker’s mouth gives off a bad smell as soon as he opens it” (Volume Two, 2.3.16). Al-Shidyāq considered Maltese a dialect of Arabic, although some modern linguists consider it a mixed language. It is descended from eleventh-century Sicilian Arabic but contains a preponderance of elements from Sicilian Romance, standard Italian, and English (Brincat, Maltese and Other Languages). Decoded, al-Shidyāq’s “treating the foul of breath” may be taken to mean teaching formal Arabic to Maltese speakers.

113 “cap… tail” (raʾs… dhanab): a play on the word raʾsmāl, meaning “(financial) capital” (literally, “the head, or greater part, of wealth”).

114 “the rope… the knot” (al-ʿiqd… al-ʿaqd): a play on two similar-sounding words, both derived from the root for “tying”; by the second (literally, “contract”) he means the tie of marriage.

115 bihim… bihā: in using plural concord to refer to “earnings” (darāhim, literally “silver coins”), the wife is following colloquial rules, which allow the use of plural concord with inanimate objects; literary Arabic prefers feminine singular concord in such cases, reserving plural concord for persons.

116 “matron… patron” (ḥayzabūn… zabūn): the wife mishears the little-known word ḥayzabūn (literally “old woman, hag”) as the common word zabūn, “patron, customer.” The patron the Fāriyāqiyyah has in mind would no doubt be one of the “foul of breath,” come for a lesson; see again 3.12.3, at the end.

117 “If you’d ‘opened’ the ṣād… a perfect line of verse” (law fataḥti l-ṣāda… baytan muṭlaqan): i.e., if she had ended the last word of each hemistich with an a vowel (fatḥah), mark of the accusative case (i.e., al-raqṣ-ā… al-naqṣ-ā), she would have turned her words into properly metered (rajaz) and rhymed verse; at the same time, baytan muṭlaqan may be understood in its technical meaning of “a line of verse whose final short vowel is converted into a long vowel, according to the convention.”

118 “such a thing”: the wife is scandalized because the letter ṣād is used in poetry as a code for the vagina (see Volume Two, 2.4.15).

119 “Dah-da-dah-dah dah-da-dah! Dah-da-dah-da dah-da-dah!” (fāʿilātun fāʿilūn fāʿilūna fāʿilāt): the Fāriyāq mimics his wife’s words, employing the mnemonic forms (constructed from the root f-ʿ-l “to do”) used to fix the patterns of long and short vowels from which the meters of classical Arabic poetry, which are quantitative, are constructed; in this case the meter seems close to majzūʾ al-madīd. At the same time, the mnemonics may be understood literally, i.e., as feminine and masculine plural active participles of the verb faʿala (“to do”), here used in a sexual sense, so that the Fāriyāq is also saying “women having sex and men having sex, men having sex and women having sex.” See 3.19.10 below for a similar conceit.

120 See Volume Two, chapter 12.

121 “the companion of madmen”: probably referring to the Bag-man who thought he could revive the dead, in Book Two, chapter 20.

122 “monk”: i.e., here, “saint.”

123 “mufāqamah, mubāḍaʿah, muwāqaʿah, and similar forms”: i.e., these verbs, all of which mean “to have sexual intercourse,” are of the pattern mufāʿalah, with which “the ideas of effort and reciprocity are always more or less clearly implied” (Wright, Grammar, I:33 D).

124 “‘What’s “conserve you” mean?’ ‘Nothing at all,’ I replied”: in the phrase ḥayyāki llāhu wa-bayyāki, rendered here as “May God preserve you and conserve you,” the element bayyāki is regarded by some lexicographers simply as an imitative element serving to increase the rhetorical force of the formula.

125 “je t’adore!… There’s no one there” (qultu li-llāhi ʿalaykī mā arā lī min yadayki manjā… mā jāʾa aḥad: the Fāriyāqiyyah understands manjā (“place of escape”) as man jā (“who came?”), the glottal stop being dropped as in the colloquial; in the translation, the locus of the misunderstanding has been shifted to the phrase li-llāhi ʿalayki (approx. “What a caution you are!”).

126 “patrons” (al-zabūn): a reference to an earlier, similar joke (see 3.11.3 at the end).

127 “How I wish that he” (alā laytuhu); ḥabīb (“beloved”), the grammatical referent of the pronoun, is always masculine in Arabic, even when, as here, the actual referent is unambiguously female.

128 “meaning her” (bi-hi ay bi-hā): a reminder to the reader that, though the Fāriyāq is following the convention of referring to the beloved in the masculine, he means the feminine; see preceding note.

129 ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muʿtazz (247–96/861–908), son of the thirteenth Abbasid caliph and himself caliph for one day before being assassinated, was a poet, “[t]he rhetorical brilliance and originality of [whose] conceits, especially in his descriptive verses… have been greatly admired by medieval critics” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, I:354–55).

130 “not every slave is an ʿAbd Allāh”: the author plays with the original meaning of ʿabd, namely “slave,” a usage often extended to mean “mortal man” and used in proper names of the form “Slave of the [name of God]” (e.g., ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (Slave of the Compassionate), etc.).

131 “the monster” (al-waḥsh): i.e., the dream of the monster, see 3.11.5.

132 In 1831, Egypt invaded Syria and Lebanon and threatened the Ottoman state; in 1840, the time of this journey, Egypt was being forced out of the Levant under pressure from both the Western powers and local uprisings.

133 “though adding nothing thereby to that of the terrifier” (wa-lam yazid qalba l-muhawwili shayʾan): the assumption apparently being that the more heart one has, the more one feels fear; in this case, the soldier remained unaffected by the shot that terrified the Fāriyāq.

134 “some staying at home” (al-barthaṭah): the author appears to have allowed his list of verbs describing ways of “sitting” (qiʿdah) to be contaminated by one relating to the radically related concept of “staying” (quʿūd), for the Qāmūs defines al-barthaṭah as “to remain unmoving in one’s house and to stick to it” (thabata fī baytihi wa-lazimahu).

135 ṭanṭūr: a cone-shaped headdress worn by women (see Volume One, 1.2.4, n. 123.)

136 “thrower of the palm-branch javelin” (rāmī al-jarīd): i.e., as a sport and a martial art.

137 Maʿbad… Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī: singers of the early to high Islamic period.

138 “akl (‘eating’) would mean taʿām (‘food’)”: this would not be surprising since, though akl is in origin a verbal noun (“eating”), it is widely used in speech as a substantive.

139 “taʾtaʾah is onomatopoeic” (al-taʾtaʾah ḥikāyatu ṣawtin): though al-Shidyāq does not specify what al-taʾtaʾah imitates, the entry in the Qāmūs implies that it is the sound of stuttering, and specifically the repetition of the letter t.

140 “two strange words that have no like in terms of structure in the entire language”: ṣaṣaṣ and qaqaq are unique in having the same consonant for each radical.

141 See Volume One, 1.13.2 n. 219.

142 “‘Wife’ is a form that’s used” (qad yuqālu zawjah): zawj, meaning “one of a pair” and hence “spouse (of either sex)” has higher authority than zawjah, with the feminine marker — ah, the latter form having been introduced, according to some lexicographers, simply “for the sake of perspicuity, fearing to confound the male with the female” (Lane, Lexicon).

143 “your regret / for the one you lost is plainly displayed” (wa-ʿalā lladhī bāyanta ḥuznuka bādī): perhaps meaning that the regret felt by a woman at foregoing promiscuity leads her to commit other offenses.

144 “food and copulation” (al-aṭyabayn): literally, “the two best things.”

145 I.e., Būrān bint al-Ḥasan ibn Sahl, wife of the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn.

146 “the palace of Ghumdān”: a fabled palace in Yemen (see Volume Two, 2.14.41).

147 “the one who’d attacked women without distinction” (alladhī hajā l-nisāʾa jamīʿan): see 3.13.8 and the reference to the man who “cast on women a wholesale blot” (hajā l-nisāʾa ṭurran).

148 “cleans them… gripes them… preens them” (tarḍiʿuhu… wa-tuṭ awwisuhu… wa-tuzahniʿuhu): the following list, preceding and following the table, of words and expressions related to child rearing is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

149 See 3.12.21 (tubāghim/bāghamahu).

150 See 3.12.21 (turaʿʿim/raʿʿamuhu).

151 See 3.12.21 (tuqarrim/taqrīm).

152 See Volume One, 1.16.10.

153 “lactation though not pregnant… postpartum prolapse… morning sickness” (wa-l-diḥāq… wa-l-tafarruth): the author’s note, which consists simply of the definitions of these words as given in the Qāmūs and which has been followed in the translation verbatim, has been omitted to avoid repetition.

154 “requiring a female neighbor to suck on it a couple of times to make it drain” (al-ʿayfah): Lane says that ʿayfah “is a term employed in the case when a woman brings forth and her milk is suppressed in her breast, wherefore her fellow-wife, or female neighbour, draws it, by the single sucking and the two suckings” (Lexicon); he also mentions that the definition in the Qāmūs, quoted by the author in his note, should read fa-tarḍiʿuhu for fa-tarḍiʿuhā.

155 ʿiddah: in Islam a divorced woman who is pregnant is forbidden to remarry for forty days following childbirth.

156 “Not for nothing did Qaṣīr cut off his nose” (li-amrin jadaʿa Qaṣīrun anfahu): the story goes that in the third century AD, during the rivalry between the Arab cities of al-Ḥīrah and Tadmur (Palmyra), a certain Qaṣīr ibn Saʿd of al-Ḥīrah cut off his nose in order to convince al-Zabbāʾ (Zenobia), queen of Tadmur, that he had been unjustly punished by the ruler of his city; this, along with a series of other maneuvers, allowed him to gain her confidence and, eventually, bring about her death in revenge for her murder of al-Ḥīrah’s former king (see al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, I:158–59). The saying, attributed to al-Zabbāʾ, became proverbial for extreme determination in pursuit of a goal.

157 “the boon companion abandoned the one to whom he’d been so close”: an allusion to the speaker’s leaving his wife, as described in 3.13.1 above.

158 “neither his body nor his mind”: the significance of the reference to the mind is made clear in chapter 17, below.

159 The monastery in question was probably that of Mār Ilyās (Roper, Fāris al-Shidyāq as Translator and Editor) near El Qraye, Mount Lebanon.

160 “or vice versa” (aw bi-l-ʿaks): i.e., it may be the monks that appeal to women, or it may be the challenge of their seduction that is uppermost in their minds.

161 “Shitter Bāy” (Bāʿir Bāy): while, at first glance, the name seems reminiscent of the code used earlier in references to Amīr (Emir) Ḥaydar as Baʿīr Bayʿar (see Volume One, 1.5.2, n. 148), in which case it might be read as standing for, for example, “Māhir Bāy” or “Tāmir Bāy,” it appears more likely that here the author is simply exploiting, for comedic purposes, the root b-ʿ-r, which has associations with “dung” (also significant, as Geoffrey Roper has pointed out, in the earlier case); thus the meaning of Bāʿir Bāy would be “Shitter Bāy” (on the title Bāy, see below 3.18.6, n. 229) and the doors that cannot be closed would be those of latrines (on which theme see further Volume Four, 4.18.3).

162 “darnel” (al-zuʾān): a weed, hard to distinguish from wheat, that can be infected by an intoxicating fungus.

163 Taftāzān: a town in Khorosan, birthplace of Masʿūd ibn ʿUmar al-Taftāzānī (died between 791/1389 and 797/1395), whose works on rhetoric were “widely accepted as the primary authoritative texts” in that field (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia).

164 “Zayd struck ʿAmr”: a conventional sentence used to illustrate a certain grammatical rule; see Volume One, 1.11.2.

165 “Which of you could bestow such blessings?” (min ayyikum yaḥṣulu dhālik): i.e., which of you, who are supposedly celibate, could provide such blessings (to be understood here as meaning “a bit of slap and tickle” or the like), this in turn being a veiled invitation to the lady to avail herself of the blessings that the non-celibate Fāriyāq was qualified to provide.

166 “a branch from the first dream”: i.e., one of the Bag-man’s wife’s lovers (see 3.8.6), whom the narrator will henceforth refer to as “the Branch.” Though it is impossible to be certain of the identity of “the Branch,” there are some pointers: in the (admittedly obscure) poem in which the author recapitulates these events (3.17.7–9), he refers to a certain Ḥannā in a way that suggests that he might be the Bag-man’s wife’s lover, while Ferdinand Christian Ewald, a missionary who passed through Malta, writing of his visit to the Schlienz household on 3 January, 1842, states that he met there “a converted Persian… another convert from Egypt, and a young Greek from Beyrout” (Ewald, Journal, 11; I am indebted to Geoffrey Roper for bringing Ewald’s statement to my attention); the convert from Egypt was likely Ḥannā al-Jawālī, a Copt who had been brought over from Egypt to assist with the translation project (Roper, Fāris al-Shidyāq as Translator and Editor). Al-Jawālī, who had attended the Protestant school in Cairo since the age of eight or nine, was in Malta between 1838 and 1842 (personal communication from Geoffrey Roper). Church Missionary Society records relating to Schlienz’s trip to Syria mention that he was accompanied by al-Shidyāq but make no mention of al-Jawālī. However, they do not state that he did not go and al-Shidyāq here explicitly links “the Branch” to dreams Schlienz dreamed while in Malta. It does therefore seem possible that Ḥanna al-Jawālī was “the Branch.” The “converted Persian” appears in chapter 17, below.

167 “his companion”: it is not clear who is intended; the likeliest candidate is the Bag-man (which may explain why the two were received so hospitably by the British vice-consul, see 3.15.6 below), though in that case the question of the whereabouts of his wife arises; this would imply that “the Branch” stayed on in Syria for a while, perhaps as a result of his accident, which would be consonant with the terms in which his reappearance is described later (see 3.17.3).

168 “the ḥabar of the women of Egypt”: a mantle of black (for married ladies) or white (for the unmarried) silk covering the head and body and open in front; see Lane, Description, 45 and 46 (illustration).

169 “eloquent” (manāṭīq): or, punningly, “had such stuffing to emphasize the size of the buttocks” (Qāmūs).

170 “a drunk” (nāhib): literally, “a thief.”

171 “the Turkish jīm”: i.e., “j” as in “James”; anjaq is Turkish ancak.

172 yitqallanu: from kullanmak, “to use.”

173 khōsh khuy: apparently, hoşhuy (“good-natured”).

174 “the deputy to the British consul (who was not the skilled and sagacious Khawājā Asʿad al-Khayyāṭ)”: according to his own account (Kayat, A Voice, 265–66), Asʿad al-Khayyāṭ actually joined Schlienz’s party in Lebanon, though al-Khayyāṭ makes no mention of the author and the author refers to al-Khayyāṭ only in this oblique fashion. Al-Khayyāṭ was in fact appointed consul in Jaffa in May 1847 (List of Consuls-General, Consuls, Vice-Consuls, Consular Agents and Consular Assistants in H.M. Service Presented to the House of Commons on 6th of June 1848, [989] XXXIX, 307, p. 7) and the sentence should presumably be understood to mean “the British vice-consul (who was not at that time the skilled and sagacious Khawājā Asʿad al-Khayyāṭ).”

175 “the smell of Umm Dafār”: according to the Qāmūs, Umm Dafār means both this world, or life itself (al-dunyā), and “a slave girl” (amah); in other words, the author seems to be saying, the smell of a woman is both another name for ecstasy, and life itself.

176 “The two of them”: i.e, the Fāriyāq and his companion referred to above (3.15.3, 3.15.6); see also n. 166 above.

177 “bringing with him the delirious promise of delicious fruit and a sturdy trunk” (wa-huwa mutarjimun ʿan janyin shahiyyin wa-jidhʿ qawī): the unusual use of mutarjim, active participle of tarjama “to translate,” may reflect the colloquial usage yitarjim bil-lisān, “to speak in unknown tongues, jabber” (see Davies, Lexicon); at the same time, the author may be hinting at the identity of “the Branch,” if the identification of the latter with the translator Ḥannā al-Jawālī is correct (see n. 165), and a second reading may be intended as well, as though the author were saying “he being a mutarjim [‘translator’] (by which of course I mean a mutarjim [‘a jabberer’]) about…”

178 Dhāt al-Niḥyayn: literally, “She of the Two Butterskins.” The story is told that this woman sold butter at the market of ʿUkāẓ near Mecca in the period immediately preceding Islam and was tricked by a man into holding two skins that he pretended he wanted to buy; while she was thus encumbered, the man had his way with her.

179 “particles of attraction” (ḥurūf al-jarr): the Arabic term for “prepositions.”

180 “But you omitted ‘particles’… They’re still there” (qad ḥadhafti l-ḥurūf… bal hiya bāqiyah): the point is obscure; perhaps the Fāriyāqiyyah understands ḥurūf in the sense of “edges” and gives the word a sexual connotation (i.e., “edges of the vagina”).

181 “theology… talking” (al-kalām… al-kalām): “theology” is referred to as kalām, literally, “talk”; the Fāriyāqiyyah recognizes the word only in its literal sense.

182 “the Hairy One” (al-Ashʿarī): ʿAlī ibn Ismāʿīl al-Ashʿarī (260–324/873–936), whose last name might be taken to mean “hairy” (albeit its real sense is “affiliate of the Banū Ashʿar”), was the founder of an influential school of theology “famed for its adoption of rational argumentation” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia); again the Fāriyāqiyyah recognizes the word only in its literal sense.

183 “seminary talk… semen” (kalāmaki hādhā l-maʿṣūd… al-ʿaṣd): in the Arabic, “twisted talk.”

184 “for reasons that will be explained” (li-asbābin yaʾtī bayānuhā): presumably, a reference to the account given in 3.17.7.

185 The poem that follows poses so many problems that this translation must be considered tentative, literal, and incomplete. The poem employs a style that the author uses only rarely (another example is the “Qaṣīdah Qimāriyyah” (“A Poem on Gambling”) in Volume Four, 4.20.39). Both poems allude to and satirically retell past events but deal with these elliptically, use coded references to persons who may or may not have been mentioned earlier in the work, and rely heavily on puns and the multiple meanings of single words. In this case, the events seem to be those of chapter 15 above (“The Journey from the Monastery”), which presents the Bag-man, his wife, and her lover (“the Branch”) in a triangle of deceit and hidden passions, and those of the present chapter, with its account of the Bag-man’s madness; the poet appears to imply a link between the two. The first part of the poem appears to be addressed to the mentally unstable missionary Christoph Schlienz (see n. 97); then, from 3.17.8 on, to the Persian convert.

186 Ḥannā: see n. 147 above.

187 “sick, depleted” (marīḍun mannā): from manna (root m-n-n) “to become diminished” (Qāmūs: naqaṣa) but also, punningly, “sick, from masturbating,” from mannā (root m-n-y).

188 “some lecher” (fāsiq): presumably meaning the Bag-man himself, given that he, along with his wife, was the only member of the party to have ridden a horse rather than a mule (see 3.15.1).

189 “his joints go weak” (zannā): from roots z-n-n and z-n-w or, punningly, “he oppressed [us],” from z-n-ʾ, or “he called us fornicators,” from z-n-y.

190 “from any tormentor who may hurt him” (min kulli muʿannin ʿannā): from root ʿ-n-y, or “from any person curious about us,” from root ʿ-n-n.

191 “the whickering doe, the snickering buck” (wa-l-ghannāʾa wa-l-aghannā): i.e., the wife and her lover, or perhaps amorous couples in general.

192 “a preacher who went mad— / And from one who goes around here — and who wept” (min nadhīrin janna/wa-min ṭawwāfin hāhunā wa-hannā): the preacher presumably is Schlienz; the identity of “one who goes around here” is not obvious.

193 “The loving couple” (al-muḥibbayn): presumably Mrs. Schlienz and “the Branch.”

194 “Madmen who have exposed their willies” (fa-min majānīna abānū l-hannā): presumably a reference to Schlienz.

195 “One afflicted… and a sickly invalid who moans” (wa-min muṣābin… wa-min ʿalīlin qad annā): both may stand for the Fāriyāq (see 3.15.2–3 above).

196 “a crabbed little man” (khubunnan): probably meaning the Fāriyāq / author.

197 “His devil” (shayṭānuhu): i.e., presumably, the poet’s demon.

198 “a book”: during the period of his first visit to England, in 1845, the author was involved in the translation of both the Bible and the Psalms (Roper, Fāris al-Shidyāq as Translator and Editor).

199 “the Committee” (al-lajnah): i.e., the governing board of either the Church Missionary Society or the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, both of which were involved in the project for the translation of the Bible.

200 “the Christians”: i.e, the Christians of the Arab world at whom the translation was targeted.

201 This insertion of a poem into the middle of a sentence that begins and ends as prose is certainly unusual and may be unique in Arabic letters.

202 “the richness of their solecisms in speaking…” (ghanāʾa l-laḥni fī l-qawli ʿindahum…): the poet appears to be saying that (from a classical literary perspective) Christians make a lot of mistakes in speaking but that they are happy with that because the way they speak sounds musical to them.

203 “al-Mawlā in reference to God”: literally, “the Lord, the Master”; presumably al-Tutūnjī favored al-rabb.

204 “wallawu l-adbāra”: the phrase means “they turned their backs” and occurs in the Qurʾān (Q Fatḥ 48:22); the metropolitan may have wanted to pronounce wallawu as wallū in keeping with colloquial paradigms.

205 “tukāh… muttakiʾ”: the root w-k-ʾ/t-k-ʾ does not form a (Form I) verb *wakaʾa/takaʾa; hence *tukāh, putative plural of an active participle *tākiʾ, does not exist, the correct form being (Form VIII) muttakiʾ.

206 “maṣūn… muṣān”: the first means “sheltered, chaste”; the second wrongly assumes the existence of a verb *aṣāna from the same root.

207 “shaʿb… qawm”: both words refer to collectivities of people but the former has connotations related to the concept of “nation” that are lacking in the second.

208 “malak… malāk”: both mean “angel” but the former belongs to the literary lexicon, the latter to the colloquial.

209 “ʿabīd… ʿibād”: both mean “slaves” but only the second is used in the phrase ʿibād allāh (“slaves of God, humankind”).

210 “ʿadhāb… rakākāt”: the plural of ʿadhāb (“torment”) is aʿdhibah, and not *ʿadhābāt; rakākāt means “leavings” or “lame forms.”

211 “sāʾir is not a synonym of bāqī”: it is usually considered to be so.

212 “wāʿiẓīhā… mūʿiẓīnahā”: the first means “those who preach to them,” the second wrongly assumes the existence of a verb *awʿaẓa from the same root; should it exist, the correct form would be *mūʿiẓīhā.

213 “addaw… waddaw”: the first word is correct according to literary norms, the latter is its colloquial equivalent.

214 “radda… muridd”: the active participle of the verb radda (“to send back”) is rādd or rādid; muridd assumes a nonexistent verb *aradda.

215 “yaẓharu… yabānu”: while the roots ẓ-h-r and b-y-n both refer to “appearing, becoming distinct,” the imperfect form of the latter (Form I) is yabīnu.

216 “ṣirnā banīnan bi-tadhakhkhur” (“and we became children by laying up” [?]): the error is banīnan for banīna, the sound plural not taking tanwīn; the sense of al-tadhakhkhur is not obvious and the verse is unidentified though reminiscent of Prov. 13:22, al-ṣāliḥu yūrithu banī l-banīna wa-tharwatu l-khāṭiʾ tudhkharu li-l-ṣiddīq (“A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just”).

217 “a maṣaff gathered glorifying God”: maṣaff is used here in the sense of “row” (ṣaff), whereas its correct meaning is “the place where a row is formed” (mawḍiʿ al-ṣaff) (Qāmūs).

218 “that a wāw immediately follows ka-mā used as a conjunction” (wa-baʿda ka-mā li-l-ʿaṭfi wāwun tubāshiru): though not apparently documented in older Middle Arabic texts (the translator is indebted to Jérôme Lentin for this information), the use of the redundant wāw is frequently met with on the Internet in phrases such as ka-mā wa-yuḥabbadhu (“just as it is to be preferred that”) (http://www.bakhdida.com/BehnamAtallah/MasrahDoma.htm) and qaṭarāt al-nadā wa-jamāluhā r-rāʾiʿ ka-mā wa-lam tushāhidhā min qabl (“dewdrops and their amazing beauty as you have never seen them before”) (http://www.forum.ennaharonline.com/thread24136.html).

219 “idh must take the jussive”: idh (“since”) should be followed by the indicative.

220 “alladhī after the dual”: invariable alladhī following referents of different number and case is a common feature of Middle Arabic.

221 “writing imperative —ī with the weak verb”: i.e., writing for (“give!”).

222 “that modern, the priest of Choueir” (qass al-Shuwayr al-muʿāṣir): the village of Choueir, or Dhour el Choueir, is located in the Matn region of Lebanon; the priest is ʿAbd Allāh Zākhir (1684–1748), a Melkite Catholic of the Basilian Choueirite Order credited with the establishment, in 1733, of the first printing press in the Middle East to use movable Arabic type, and a writer (see also next line).

223 “retention of the nūn of — ūna following kay and an”: i.e., use of the indicative in place of the subjunctive following kay (“in order to”) and an (conjunctive “that”) (e.g., *kay yaktubūna for kay yaktubū [“that they may write”] or *arādū an yadhhabūna for arādū an yadhhabū[“they wanted to go”]).

224 “after yuʿṭā to put the subject supplying the agent in the accusative is / A necessity”: i.e., when a subject supplying the place of an agent (here, nāʾib fāʿil; see Wright, Grammar, II269 D) follows a passive verb, as in the sentence yuʿṭā l-kitāb (“the book is given”), the subject must be in the accusative (though correct usage requires the nominative).

225 “the story of al-Maʾmūn and the jurisprudent ʿAllawayh”: in this much-recorded anecdote, the caliph al-Maʾmūn demonstrates to his companions, at the expense of a certain faqīh called “Ḥamdawayh, known as ʿAllawayh,” that “a man’s brain shrinks as his beard grows” (see, e.g., Muḥammad al-Munāwī, Fayḍ al-qadīr fi sharḥ al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaghīr [Lebanon: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 1994], 5).

226 “one of those natives of the island who are between the Market-men and the Bag-men, and sometimes between the latter and the philosophers”: one might hazard that the author means the Anglicans.

227 I.e., either out of respect for Friday as the Muslim Sabbath or the contrary.

228 “The latter had borrowed….”: a swipe, presumably, at the man’s rudeness in not returning so necessary an item sooner and/or his miserliness in not buying his own, despite being “the son of an officer in the army of the Pope”; “phosphoric matches” (nabakhāt) were a recent invention and little known at the time in the Levant (see Kayat, Voice, 255).

229 “Counselor” (mushīr): a title awarded the ruler of Tunis by his nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan.

230 Bāy is a variant of the Turkish honorific that is realized more frequently in the eastern Arab countries as Bayk or Bayh and was appended to the names of all rulers of the Husainid dynasty of Tunis.

231 I.e. February 5, 1842 AD.

232 “dust-laden… harmattan” (ḥāṣib… sāfiyāʾ): the following list of words related to wind is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

233 “odors overpowering… and oro-dyslalic” (rawāʾiḥ hanbiyyah… najwiyyah): the following list of words, most of which are related to foul smells, with others related to effeminacy and to impaired speech, is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

234 “schwa-ations” (al-qalqalāniyyah): it is assumed here that the word, which is not to be found in the lexica, is to be taken as equivalent to qalqalah, meaning “the insertion of /ə/ [the neutral vowel schwa] after syllable-final /q/, /d/, /ṭ/, and /j/” in the recitation of the Qurʾān (Nelson, Art, 22).

235 “sibillations” (al-kaskasiyyah): “the adding of /s/ following the feminine suffix /k/… at the end of an utterance” (Lisān).

236 “shibillations” (al-kashkashiyyah): “substitution of /sh/ for the feminine second-person suffix /k/” (Lisān).

237 “how to clean out the mud” (taṣlīḥ al-ṭabaʿ): or, reading al-ṭabʿ, “how to correct the proofs.”

238 “reclusion” (al-iʿtizāl): the Fāriyāq has used the same word in its contemporary sense of “quarantine,” but the Fāriyāqiyyah takes it in its root sense of “holding oneself aloof,” with, in this context, a sexual connotation.

239 “Will he be with one of his wives?” (amaʿa jārin lahu): the Fāriyāqiyyah appears to be questioning whether Sāmī Pasha will be making the same sacrifice of female companionship that he is demanding of the Fāriyāq.

240 “If the name were enough…”: i.e., if a name were enough to compensate a woman for what she will miss by way of lovemaking when her husband is summoned by his emir, she could simply write “emir” on her body.

241 “and treat her frivolously…” (wa-yuʿāmiluhā bil-khayʿarah…): the following list of words, most of which are related to levity and unsteadiness, anger, disordered speech, rudeness and coarseness, physical violence, and infidelity, is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

242 ghabūq: defined by the Qāmūs as “what (i.e., of camel’s milk) is drunk in the evening” and by Lane as “a she-camel whose milk one drinks in the evening,” the relevance being, in either case, obscure.

243 “an intelligent man skilled at his work” (al-ṭabb): this, and most of the other words in this and the following lists, have multiple meanings and/or vowelings, and it is not always obvious which the author has in mind.

244 “basṭ… sharḥ”: here, as in some further items in this list, the “conformity” is semantic rather than formal (as each comes from a different root), with both having the underlying sense of “opening up” and similar figurative uses (note shariḥa ṣadruhu, “his breast became open” or “he became glad”).

245 “Every other difficulty pales into insignificance next to such things” (kullu ṣaʿbin fī janbi dhāka yahūn): i.e., next to the difficulties of the Arabic language.

246 “assy-nonymous” (ardāfiyyah): i.e., mutarādifah meaning “synonymous,” though the Fāriyāqiyyah confuses the word with ardāf, from the same root, meaning “buttocks.”

247 “Multiply and fill the earth”: cf. “be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth” (Gen. 8:17).

248 Cf. (1 Tim. 2:15): “… she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.”

249 “This bitty-buttocked…” (hādhihi… al-rasḥāʾ…): the following list of words related to having insufficient flesh on the backside, the thighs, the calves, the breasts, or the arms is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

250 “This short, little…” (hādhihi… al-bultūqah al-duʿshūqah…): the following list of words related to shortness of stature is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

251 “This black, sable…” (hādhihi… al-sawdāʾ al-musakhkhamah…): the following list of words related to blackness is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

252 “This old, aged…”: (hādhihi… al-ʿajūz al-mutahaddimah…): the following list of words related to old age and decrepitude is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

253 “dustūr”: “The great wezeer… to whom recourse is had [by the King] with respect to what he may prescribe concerning the circumstances of the people” (Lane, Lexicon); see also following note.

254 “dussa tawrun”: “a messenger was secretly sent”; as usual in such word puzzles, it is the unvowelled ductus that is in play; thus may be broken down into and re-vowelled, and reconstructed as given .

255 “Two parts to which the male can lay no claim” (ḥaẓẓāni lā li-l-dhakar): an echo of Q Nisāʾ 4:11, where, in stipulating inheritance shares, God says, “a male should receive a share equivalent to that of two females” (li-l-dhakari mithlu ḥazzi l-unthayayn); the conceit inverts the allocation.

256 “in a state of sin” (nukran): and also perhaps, punningly, “as a cipher” or “one unknown,” or even “in a state of indefiniteness” (cf. nukirah “indefinite noun”).

257 “precedence of the masculine” (taghlīb al-mudhakkar): on taghlīb, see Volume Two, 2.12.7 n. 140; the “precedence” referred to here is that implied by the grammatical rule that a masculine plural form may be taken to refer to persons of both sexes, whereas a feminine plural form can refer to women only, e.g. yarawna (“they (masculine and possibly feminine) see”) and yarayna (“they (feminine only) see.”)

258 “crawling” (ziḥāf): a pun combining the nontechnical sense of the word and its technical use in the science of prosody, where it refers to certain metrically acceptable changes to a two-consonant syllable (sabab) as a component of a foot.

259 “propping” (sināduhu): again, a pun combining the nontechnical sense of the word and its technical use in the science of prosody, where it refers to “dissimilarity of two ridfs in verse” (ikhtilāf al-ridfayni fī l-shiʿr), the ridf being “one of the letters of prolongation or , when it immediately precedes the rawī” (Wright, Grammar, II:353); dissimilarity would mean the permissible rhyming of, e.g., qarīḥ with ṭarūb, since “the long vowel ā remains invariable” (idem).

260 “I want pussy, I want pussy, I want pussee!” (mustafʿilun mustafʿilun mustafʿilū): forms based on the root f-ʿ-l are used to represent the combinations of short and long syllables from which the sixteen quantitative meters of Arabic verse are formed; thus mustafʿilun (mustafʿilū in the final foot) represents the combination LLSL, a variant of the meter called al-kāmil (see Wright, Grammar, II:359). However, mustafʿilun may also be interpreted as the active participle of the desiderative form of the verb (see Wright, Grammar, I:45 [63]), deriving its sense here from fiʿl, meaning “the vulva of any female” (Qāmūs). A similar conceit is used in 3.11.4 above.

261 “your ‘shame’ inspires me to worship and to insane passion” (ḥayāʾuki taʾlīhī wa-tawlīhī): ḥayāʾuki may be interpreted as either “your shame/modesty” or “your vagina”; this allows for the possibility that taʾlīhī (“my considering you divine”) is intended to evoke the first meaning (“your shame/modesty”) while tawlīhī (“my being driven insane by passion”) evokes the second, according to the rhetorical figure known as istikhdām (“employing (both meanings of a homonym)”) (see Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, II:657).

262 “growths, lumps… necrosities” (al-waram wa-l-nuffākh… al-khunāq): the following list of words related to maladies affecting the neck, throat, and face, or more generally the skin is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

263 “man-mannered, ill-natured….” (al-zanmardah al-ʿanjarid…): the following list of words related to shamelessness, foulmouthedness, promiscuity, and the display of sexual desire is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

264 “to look lively and apply himself to intercourse…” (ilā l-tamshīr…): the following list of words related to sexual activity is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

265 “your teacher”: i.e., her husband, the Fāriyāq.

266 “the windy day… when” (wa-yawma… wa-ḥīnata): each of the next several sentences begins with a word meaning “on the day (or at another point in time) when”; the original list comprises thirteen separate words for point of time or time periods but these can be matched by only ten expressions for time in the English; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

267 “sent your servingman… dispatched your serving girl”: i.e. to take someone a billet-doux.

268 “you tied a piece of string around your finger” (artamti): perhaps as a reminder of an assignation.

269 “toiled and moiled…” (taʿannā wa-taʿammala…): the following list of words related to hard work, failure to complete or to properly carry out work, lying, confusion, and conceitedness is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword. On takassus and tazabbub, see also the author’s marginal note to 3.2.27.

270 “Is there in the universe no glass…” (a-laysa fī l-kawni min mirʾāh…): the following list of words related to mirrors is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword. The term māriyyah is defined in the printed editions of the Qāmūs as al-marʾah al-bayḍāʾ al-barrāqah (“a shining white woman”) and its presence in the list reflects either the author’s misreading of marʾah as mirʾāh or an incorrect vowelling of the word in a printed edition of the Qāmūs.

271 “Syrian Tripoli” (Ṭarābulus al-Shām): i.e., the city that today is in Lebanon, as distinct from Libyan Tripoli.

272 “His reading in grammar…” (fa-ghāyatu mā ʿalimahu mina l-naḥw…): here and in the following clauses the author uses terms that may be interpreted either technically, according to the field in question, or according to their base senses, in which case they are also open to a sexual or vulgar interpretation. Thus al-fāʿīl wa-l-mafʿūl are “subject and object” in grammatical terms but “the doer and the done” in their basic senses and “the fucker and the fucked” when used sexually.

273 “the figure of ‘stripping’” (nawʿ al-tajrīd): in the field of rhetoric, “abstraction,” i.e. “‘abstracting a general attribute from an individual’ according to the pattern of ‘in him (individual) I have a true friend (general attribute)’” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, II:659); the base sense is “stripping off (of clothes).”

274 “the movable peg” (al-watid al-mutaḥarrik): in the science of prosody, the watid (literally “peg”) is a three-consonant syllable as a constituent of a metrical foot; when a watid ends in a consonant followed by a vowel it is said to be “moving” (mutaḥarrik) (see Wright, Grammar, II:358D and 355B); its base sense is “peg,” commonly used for “penis.”

275 “having the buttock echo the breast” (radd al-ʿajuz ʿalā l-ṣadr): i.e., “repeating the rhyme word in the first hemistich, often at the beginning of the line, or sometimes at the start of the second hemistich” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, II:660); the technical sense of ʿajuz is “the last foot,” that of ṣadr “the first foot of the first hemistich,” of a line of verse; their base senses are as given in the translation.

276 “pipe stems” (qaṣab al-tibgh): tobacco pipes of the period consisted of a small earthenware bowl fitted to the end of a long stem, and these stems were stored on racks on the walls.

277 “dear shame-faced abstainer” (yā rāqiʾan): i.e., yā rāqiʾan ʿalā ẓalʿika, see Volume One, 1.1.2, n. 35.

278 “Dear blind-eye turner” (yā ʿāmisan): i.e., “turner of a blind eye to one’s own faults” though also, punningly, “dear peruser (of this book).” The reader will note too that in Arabic, not only do the four preceding words rhyme but the first and third and the second and fourth are examples of “perfect paronomasia,” i.e., each consists of the same letters in different order.

279 “Were the Almighty to call his servants to account for their thoughtless words as severely as you do” (law inna llāha taʿālā yuʿākhidhu l-ʿibāda fī-l-laghwi mithlukum): an echo of Q Baqarah 2:225 lā yuʾākhidhukumu llāhu fi l-laghwi fī aymānikum (“God will not call you to account for thoughtlessness in your oaths”) (trans. Yūsuf ʿAlī), and similarly Māʾidah 5:89.

280 “That… goes with the other!” (wa-hādhā ayḍan min dhāk): the Fāriyāq seems to mean that the Fāriyāqiyyah’s last remark is an example of the fact that “our language… is so wide that it allows every expression to bear numerous possible meanings”; the Fāriyāqiyyah, however, lends a sexual innuendo to “that” and “this.” Here and throughout the exchange the language is elusive and open to more than one interpretation, and the translation offered here — for which I am indebted in part to the suggestions of Michael Cooperson and Gerald Van Gelder — is tentative; for a different interpretation, see Khawam, Jambe, 554.

281 “In one of the two meanings”: as already mentioned (3.18.14, in the middle), the Qāmūs defines rajul as “too well-known to require definition [i.e., ‘man, a male of the human species’]; also, one who has frequent intercourse.”

282 “the dismemberment of our relationship… the dehydration of your member” (al-inbitāt… al-inbitāt): the joke lies in each phrase using the same word in a different way; thus the verb inbatta may mean either “[i]t was… cut off [of] a thing… and a tie… between two persons” or “[h]is… seminal fluid became cut off…” (Lane, Lexicon), the Fāriyāqiyyah presumably meaning that he will never find another woman to have sex with.

283 “rooftop… top[ling]… top[ling]” (al-saṭḥ… al-saṭḥ… al-saṭḥ): after the Fāriyāq evokes the “rooftop” (al-saṭḥ) that witnessed their falling in love (3.2.1), the Fāriyāqiyyah uses the opportunity to (mis)understand the word in another of its senses, namely “to bed.”

284 “ḍighn… ‘yearning’”: according to the Qamūs, ḍighn means both “yearning” and “malice.”

285 “ʿIqyawn”: “a sea of wind beneath the Throne in which there are angels of wind with spears of wind gazing at the Throne whose Magnificat is ‘Glory to Our Lord Most High!’” (Qāmūs); see Volume Two, 2.14.43.

286 “fiṭaḥl”: “the preadamic period” (see 3.12.2).

287 “ḥabrah”: “yellowness of the teeth” (Qāmūs); in fact, the word has not occurred in precisely this form before; however, ḥabar, the verbal noun from which it derives, is used in the list of maladies affecting the neck and adjacent parts of the body in 3.19.12.

288 “its closeness to ʿiqyān… faḥl… ḥibarah”: i.e., the Fāriyāqiyyah was able to memorize these abstruse words because of their resemblance to other words describing things dear to her heart.

289 “She replied, ‘And they also say that tasdīd (“the plugging of holes”) is from sadād (“proper behavior”)…’” (qālat wa-qālū…): the following passage poses numerous problems and the translation advanced above is tentative and does not claim to reveal the underlying argument.

290 I.e., he sent further examples of the metropolitan’s grammatical errors.

291 “a book on the state of the island’s inhabitants”: in 1834, al-Shidyāq published al-Riḥlah al-mawsūmah bi-l-Wāsiṭah bi-maʿrifat aḥwāl Māliṭah (The Book of Travel Entitled Means to a Knowledge of the State of Malta) (Beirut: al-Muʾassasah al-ʿArabiyyah li-l-Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr, 2004).

292 “the head of the infirmary for the foul of breath” (raʾīs maṣlaḥ al-bukhr): i.e., the director of the school for teaching Arabic to the Maltese (see 3.11.2).

293 Mr. Drummond: unidentified but likely a member of the gentry of the village in which the Fāriyāq was “fated to reside” (see further n55).

294 “amber”: i.e., such as that used to make mouthpieces for pipes.

295 “for whose typeface I take no responsibility”: elsewhere, the author describes the font used in the first edition, which was made in Paris by the printer, as being “of alien form” (see “A Note on the Arabic Text,” Volume One, p.xxxiii n78).

296 “turnips”: the author uses the word qulqās, which means “taro” or “elephant’s ear” (an edible tuber); since the latter is not grown widely in England, it seems likely that he had in mind turnips, which somewhat resemble taro.

297 “a quarter of a language”: a reference to the supposed propensity of the author’s countrymen for learning only the rude words in any language (see 4.1.3).

298 The narrative of the Fāriyāq’s travels now resumes at the point where we left it at the end of the previous volume (Volume Three, 3.20.6), while the repartee that follows is in essence a continuation of that between him and his wife that preceded her own departure earlier for Cairo (Volume Three, 3.20.1–4).

299 “Half the latter and half the former” (niṣfun min hādhā wa-niṣfun min dhāk): the Fāriyāqiyyah probably means no more than “a bit of both” but the Fāriyāq takes her words literally (see what follows).

300 “Application of naḥt brings us back to the first” (yurjiʿunā l-naḥtu ilā l-awwal): naḥt means taking parts of two words and creating from them a third; here, the Fāriyāq takes the first half of the first word in his question (nākir) and the second half of the second (shākir) and finds himself (since the second half of each word is identical) back at the first, i.e., nākir (“hatefully”).

301 “or the first brings us back to another meaning of naḥt” (aw yurjiʿunā l-awwalu ilā n-naḥt): the Qāmūs gives “intercourse” as one of the meanings of naḥt, and the first half of the first word in the Fāriyāq’s question, i.e., nākir, is nāk, which means “to fuck.”

302 “Which first did you have in mind?” (ayyu awwalin aḍmarti): i.e., “were you thinking of the first part of nākir (see preceding note) or of shākir,” the first part of shākir being interpretable as shākk, i.e., “doubting.”

303 “You forbade me before to deal with you on the basis of suspicion” (innaki kunti nahaytinī ʿani l-muʿāmalah bi-l-qasm): here, as in an earlier passage (Volume Three, 3.20.1: “dealing… on a basis of conjecture and suspicion”), the author puns on two senses of qasm, namely “doubt” and “definition by division” or “logic chopping.”

304 “I’m the one sinned against” (huwa yaʾtīnī): because her husband’s questions imply doubt.

305 “Does the word ‘no’ have no place in your mouth?” (a-mā fī fīki lafẓatu lā): presumably meaning, “I would have preferred it if you had simply said, ‘No, I won’t’ in answer to my request that you explain what you meant.”

306 “It used to be pronounced ‘yes’” (kānat naʿam): perhaps meaning, “When we were first married, I never said no to you.”

307 “A no from a woman is a boon” (inna lā mina l-marʾati ilan): perhaps implying that the Fāriyāq found his wife’s demands exhausting

308 “If a woman doesn’t fit properly she’ll never give birth” (wa-lā talidu man lā talīq): the verb yalīq means “to be proper, fitting” (as in the Fāriyāq’s statement) and also “to stick, to cling, to fit tightly,” as in the Fāriyāqiyyah’s.

309 “the same Matter… different Forms” (māddah… ikhtilāf al-ṣuwar): the banter now draws on the terminology of Aristotelian logic, as in an earlier passage (see Volume One, 1.6.4.). In their Aristotelian senses the māddah (literally, “matter”) is the substratum of which any entity consists and the ṣūrah (“picture, shape”) is the form in which it is manifested; here, the Fāriyāq argues that the Matter (i.e., sexual intercourse) is the same in essence under all circumstances (and a woman should not therefore need more than one lover) while the Fāriyāqiyyah exploits the Aristotelian idea that Matter must possess a certain degree of consistency to manifest itself to argue that if the Matter is not “copious and inseparable” (ziyādah muttaṣilah), it will manifest itself in a variety of Forms, i.e., if a woman does not enjoy sufficient and regular intercourse she will seek a variety of lovers.

310 “in certain circumstances… where the circumstances of certain people are concerned” (fī baʿḍi l-aḥwāl… aḥwāli l-baʿḍ): the Fāriyāqiyyah seems to imply that the Fāriyāq makes an exception, in the case of certain women he knows, from the preference for monogamy that he has just expressed.

311 “ghāniyah”: literally, “she who dispenses (with something)”; see further Volume One, 1.1.11n105.

312 “ʿawānī”: plural active participle of the verb ʿanā (“to be subservient; to be taken by force”); the Fāriyāqiyyah is reminded of the word because of its resemblance to ghawānī, plural of ghāniyah, from which it differs, as she goes on to say, by a single dot.

313 “though the dot on the one ought to put in a good word for the other” (hādhihi n-nuqṭatu shafaʿat fī tilk): i.e., the dot that produces a word (ghawānī) meaning women ought to intercede to prevent those referred to by an otherwise identical word (ʿawānī) from being taken captive.

314 “dotting” (al-tanqīṭ): the word may be taken to mean either “placing dots over letters” or “dripping, spotting.”

315 “scripting” (al-taḥrīf): in the surface context of the discussion of writing, the word may be taken to mean “creating written characters,” in that of the sexual subtext as “rubbing against the edge (ḥarf),” and in the broader context of men’s disingenuousness regarding women as “distorting the meaning (of a word).”

316 “and the woman who chases men ends up unchased” (wa-l-ṭālibatu taʿūdu ghayra maṭlūbah): i.e., undesired by her husband because she has entertained a suitor and undesired by her suitor because she has not acceded to his wishes.

317 “martyrs… medulla oblongarters” (al-aḥwāl… al-abwāl): the Fāriyāqiyyah means to say, “were it not for the necessity of circumstances, they wouldn’t worry their heads about such things”; however, knowing that the singular of aḥwāl (literally, “state, condition”) is ḥāl, she assumes that the plural of bāl (“mind, intellect”) is abwāl, which, in fact, is the plural of bawl (“urine”). The translation substitutes a different distortion.

318 “no conformity between male and female or between female and male” (lam takun munāsabatun bayna l-dhakari wa-l-unthā wa-bayna l-unthā wa-l-dhakar): perhaps meaning that there would be no words such as qafā (“back of the neck”) and kabid (“liver”) that may be treated as either masculine or feminine (for a list see Hava, al-Farāʾid, v [unnumbered in the original]).

319 “the masculinization of the true feminine” (tadhkīr ḥaqīqat al-taʾnīth): perhaps meaning the formation of words such as ʿajūz (“old woman”) and ḥāmil (“pregnant”) that are masculine in form but feminine in meaning (for a list see Hava, al-Farāʾid, v [unnumbered in the original]).

320 “the feminization of words that have no equivalent” (wa-taʾnīthi mā huwa ghayru muqābilin bi-mithlihi): perhaps meaning that assignment of feminine gender to certain words such as shams (“sun”) and kaʾs (“cup”) that are often described as being feminine simply by usage is in fact due to their lack of any formally feminine equivalent (i.e., there is no shamsah or kaʾsah).

321 “the Syrians” (al-shāmiyyīn): a term that here would signify Levantines in general.

322 “Would that I had… two hearts to devote to these concerns of ours” (layta lī qalbayni fī shughlinā): meaning perhaps, “Would that I could deal with the world (or perhaps specifically the world as it affects ‘us,’ i.e., us women) as both a woman and (in the terms described in the preceding passage) a man.”

323 “in part by design and in part through preference and predilection” (baʿḍuhu bi-l-takhṣīṣi wa-baʿḍuhu bi-l-tafḍīli wa-l-īthār): meaning perhaps that some things (e.g., feminine charms) belong to women by divine design while others (e.g., wealth) do so because men cede them to them.

324 “Judges, chapter 19”: the chapter relates how a man, staying overnight in the village of Gibeah, is forced to hand over his concubine to local men and how “they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning…. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was…. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered.” (Judges 19:25–28)

325 The following definitions in quotation marks are taken by the author directly from the Qāmūs.

326 “the sworn virgin, who ‘abstains completely from intercourse’” (al-shafīratu wa-hiya l-qāniʿatu mina l-biʿāli bi-aysarihi): the author ignores, either carelessly or teasingly, the second and more contextually appropriate meaning of shafīrah given in the Qāmūs, which is “she who finds her pleasure in the edges of her vagina and therefore comes quickly.”

327 4.2.13–16: as in an earlier passage (see 4.2.2), many of the terms used in this debate are taken from the vocabulary of theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafah); of note here are ziyādah (“increase”), nuqṣān (“diminution”), ṣifah (“distinguishing characteristic”), ʿāmm (“general, universal”), khāṣṣ (“particular”), and q-s-m “definition by division.”

328 “the two last characteristic abilities” (al-ṣifatān al-madhkūratān): reference appears to be to keeping going longer, penetrating more deeply, and maintaining a harder erection, with the author either regarding one of these three as subsidiary to one of the others or miscounting.

329 The term taṣawwur, meaning how the mind perceives things outside of the soul, is typically translated as “conceptualization” in philosophical contexts such as this. However, given the emphasis on the visual aspect of what is conceptualized elsewhere in the work (see 4.2.8, 4.4.5, 4.6.5, and 4.9.8), “visualization” has sometimes also been used.

330 Yaʿqūb: the reference is perhaps to Yaʿqūb (Jacob) sleeping with Leah when he supposed he was sleeping with Rachel (Gen. 29:23–25).

331 I.e., a woman will “visualize” various men in the hope of selecting from each some physical characteristic that will be passed on to her children.

332 I.e., a man’s infidelities, unlike a woman’s, do not serve the useful purpose of making their children better-looking since if a woman is unfaithful then her children will be better-looking than if they were fathered by her husband (it being assumed here that husbands are ugly), whereas if her husband is unfaithful his infidelity will (obviously) have no impact upon the looks of her children.

333 “the different ways in which the father and the mother visualize”: the implication appears to be that men have no impact on the form of their offspring because they visualize women purely in terms of their sexual traits, while women do have such an impact because they think of men in terms of discrete and not directly sexual attributes; as a rider, it is added that proof that men do not affect the form of their offspring lies in the fact that, if they did, given their narrow obsession with sexual attributes, all their children would be females, etc.

334 “frontward is better” (al-ṭardu awlā): the translation reflects the meaning of al-ṭard when it occurs in context with al-ʿaks (“backward”); alone, however, al-ṭard has the also relevant sense of “ejection/ejaculation.”

335 “Unitarians…” (al-muwaḥḥidūn…): the Fāriyāqiyyah, in inventing words to describe those who perform once, etc., has hit on the names of various religious sects, for which the Fāriyāq makes fun of her by invoking further real sects whose names can be similarly interpreted; thus the Muʿtazilites were practitioners of speculative dogmatism but the word can be taken to mean “those who withdraw,” while the Muʿaṭṭilites were deniers of the divine attributes but the word can be taken as meaning “those who go on strike.”

336 “without redeeming qualities” etc.: the Fāriyāqiyyah, being ignorant of the specialized meaning of the word (see preceding note), takes it in its literal sense of “strikers” (i.e., men who down tools).

337 “ ‘My sense of feeling,’ I said, ‘is in my head’ ” (ḥissī fī raʾsī): though the author appears at first to be alluding to the opposition of heart vs. head, it emerges that by “head” he means “tip” (of the male member).

338 “Try then to break it” (ḥāwil idhan fakkahu): the surface meaning seems to be an appeal to the Fāriyāq to break the closed circle of their argument; however, it may also be read as a request to restore their amicable relationship by initiating sexual intercourse.

339 “I reject such a characterization” (lā arḍā bi-hādhihi ṣ-ṣifah): the Fāriyāq (presumably willfully) mishears al-ʿaqd (“contract”) as al-ʿaqid, which can mean (of a dog) “[having its] penis… compressus in coitu, et extremitate turgens” (Lane, Lexicon).

340 “Was the contract over the condition?” (hal kāna al-ʿaqdu fī l-sharṭ): meaning either, “Was the contract (between us) dependent on the condition (sharṭ) (that we remain faithful to one another)?” or “Was the contract between us dependent on the slit (also sharṭ)?”

341 “And was the condition without a contract?” (wa-hal kāna l-sharṭu bi-lā ʿaqd): or “and was the slit without a contract?”, i.e., “and could you have [access to] the slit without a [marriage] contract?”

342 “that lunatic”: i.e., the Bag-man who went insane and stripped off his clothes (see Volume Three, 3.17.2).

343 “utmost goal” (muhwaʾannahā): defined in the Lisān as “distant place” (makān baʿīd) and “broad desert” (ṣaḥrāʾ wāsiʿ), the word is not found in the Qāmūs and seems out of place here; the translation is speculative.

344 “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord”: not in fact Psalms but Proverbs 21:1.

345 “he was ‘rubbing’ him” (yatamassaḥu bihi): on the practice of drawing the hands over the accoutrements of venerated persons, see Volume One, 1.16.7n245.

346 “the Sublime State” (al-dawlah al-ʿaliyyah): the Ottoman Empire.

347 “that village”: i.e., Barley in Hertfordshire, where the Reverend Samuel Lee, professor of Hebrew and formerly of Arabic at Cambridge and with whom the author was engaged in the translation of the Bible, was rector; the work was carried out at the rectory (see Roper, “Aḥmad Fāris” 236).

348 “the book referred to earlier”: i.e., the Bible; see Volume Three, 3.18.1n198.

349 “the ḥadanbadā chapter”: i.e. Volume Three, chapter 19, of which ḥadanbadā (“marvel”) is the second word.

350 “the element of discussion” (rukn al-dhikr): see 4.2.16.

351 “for the pressing…” (lil-nabrah…): in the first item of each of the following pairs, the word in question is used in its nontechnical sense, while in the second it is used in its technical sense according to the lexicon of phonetics and/or Qurʾanic recitation; thus nabrah, as the second term, means stress or accent, hamzah means a glottal stop, ḥarakah a vowel (because a consonant followed by a vowel is said to be “in motion”), sukūn a consonant not followed by a vowel (because such letters are said to be “inert”), madd the prolongation of a to ā in a variety of vocalic contexts (see Wright: Grammar I/24–25), hadhdh a rapid quickening of pace in the recitation of the Qurʾān (considered inappropriate), tarkhīm the omission of one or more of the final letters of a noun in the vocative indicating a low level of energy in the uttering of the word, tarassul a slowing of the pace of a reading.

352 “doubling of the letter dhāl” (al-tashdīd ʿalā l-dhāl): perhaps meaning specifically in the word al-dhakar (“the penis”). As a “sun” letter, dhāl (/dh/) is assimilated to the lām (/l/) of the definite article; thus al-dhakar is pronounced adh-dhakar, providing the speaker, in this case, with an opportunity to give extra prominence to the word.

353 “The best way to mend a slit is to sew it up” (inna dawāʾa l-shaqqi an taḥūṣahu): proverbial (see the Qāmūs s.v. ḥ-w-ṣ).

354 Ibn Alghaz: the name of a man of whom it is said that he was “much given to copulation and intercourse; he would lie down and get an erection, and the young camels would come and rub themselves against his penis, taking it for a scratching post” (Qāmūs).

355 the Banū Adhlagh: a tribe “characterized by intercourse” (Qāmūs).

356 “If at first you don’t succeed…” (al-ʿawdu aḥmad): a proverb; literally, “A second, or subsequent, attempt (after a failure) is more likely to succeed because of the experience gained” (al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ I:324).

357 “Always count twice” (man ʿadda ʿād): the proverb has not been found in the sources and the relevance in this context is not obvious.

358 “Come early as the crow” (bakkir bukūra l-ghurāb): the crow being, proverbially, the first bird to wake (al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ I:79).

359 “turning disdainfully to one side… like a mirage dissipating” (al-ṣufūḥ… muzlaʾimmah): the following list of words related to shying and fleeing is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter, using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

360 “an agitation… a rattling of the jaw” (al-qushaʿrīrah… al-qafqafah): the list of thirty-seven words in the original relating to riʿdah (“shaking”), qushaʿrīrah (“shivering”), and ḥāʾir bāʾir (“dizzy-headedness”) (see 5.2.11) is represented here by twenty-nine English words or phrases selected from Roget’s Thesaurus (see Translator’s Afterword); ʿusūm is, according to the Qāmūs, the verbal noun of ʿasama “to gain,” but the author appears to use it as the verbal noun of ʿasima “to suffer stiffness of the wrist or ankle joint,” for which the correct form, according to the Qāmūs, is ʿasam.

361 “the four humors… each mix” (al-akhlāṭu l-arbaʿatu… kullu khilṭ): according to the Galenic system, varying combinations of the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm) in the body result in different moods (sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic).

362 “euphorbia fruit” (qurmūṭah): the comparison of euphorbia fruit, or red scrub berries, to women’s breasts is conventional; see Volume Three, 3.6.8.

363 “Joshua would not have been able to enter the Promised Land”: the reference is to Rahab the harlot (Josh. 2).

364 “Abraham would not have found favor with the King of Egypt”: the reference is to Sarai, wife of Abram (i.e., Sarah, wife of Abraham), see Gen. 12:14–16.

365 “David… an image in his bed”: “Saul also sent messengers unto David’s house, to watch him, and to slay him in the morning: and Michal David’s wife told him, saying, If thou save not thy life to night, to morrow thou shalt be slain. So Michal let David down through a window: and he went, and fled, and escaped. And Michal took an image, and laid it in the bed, and put a pillow of goats’ hair for his bolster, and covered it with a cloth” (1 Sam. 19:11–13).

366 “the wife of Nabal”: i.e., Abigail (1 Sam. 25).

367 “Bathsheba’s stratagem against David”: 1 Kings 1:11–14.

368 “the Anglican sect” (madhhab al-inkilīz): referring, presumably, to Queen Elizabeth I (cf. Volume Two, 2.14.89).

369 “the ḍād… the ḍaʾd”: the letter ḍād is supposedly unique to Arabic, which is often referred to as lughat al-ḍād (“the language of the ḍād”); ḍaʾd, a variant of ḍād, also means “the vagina,” probably because of the shape of the letter , as is the case with the letter ṣād , from which it differs only in having a dot (see similarly Volume Two, 2.4.15n79).

370 “the mīm”: i.e., the letter mīm , which stands for the anus (see similarly Volume Two, 2.4.15n79).

371 “because the more bitter cold required that” (li-kawni ziyādati qarṣati l-bardi awjaba dhālik): meaning, presumably, that the women had been forced to put on thicker clothing.

372 “for everything that falls there’s something to pick it up” (li-kulli sāqiṭah lāqiṭah): i.e., approx. “every Jack has his Jill,” it being noted that sāqiṭah may also be understood to mean “fallen woman.”

373 “When you enter the land of al-Ḥuṣayb, run” (idhā jiʾta arḍa l-Ḥuṣaybi fa-harwil): according to the Qāmūs, al-Ḥuṣayb is a place in Yemen “whose women are of surpassing beauty.”

374 “Londra”: the author alternates throughout the text between this Italian- (or possibly French-) derived form, which was that used at the time in Lebanon, and “London.”

375 “hips”: in the Arabic, “forearms” (al-sāʿidayn).

376 “with undoing, dresses” (wa-mina l-ḥalli ḥulal): presumably meaning that a woman’s acquiescence to a man’s demands leads to her acquisition of dresses.

377 “with this trait” (bi-hādhihi l-ḥilyah): i.e., with the trait of contrariness and refusal to compromise.

378 “‘A woman’s eyes,’ she declared… the situation I have described will come about” (qālat inna ʿaynay al-marʾah… fa-waqaʿa mā qult): i.e., if a woman does not keep track of how distant or close she and her husband are, the balance between the two will be disturbed (to her disadvantage).

379 “O delight of my eye!” (yā qurrata l-ʿayn): i.e., why do people use this phrase that implies that the eye is given to content rather than discontent?

380 “Prevention of your neighbor from visiting your house”: to be taken in the context of his later reference to a handsome young neighbor who is always dropping by (4.7.4).

381 “the hair on the lower sprouts before the hair on the upper” (shaʿru l-aʿlā yanbitu qabla l-asfal): apparently “the hair on the upper” means the facial hair, even though the Fāriyāqiyyah subsequently talks of head hair.

382 “the first category”: i.e., to the physical rather than the moral difference between men and women.

383 “trenches… firestones, campsites… women in camel litters” (nuʾy… athāfī… dawāris… ẓawāʿin): all these items are frequently referred to in pre-Islamic poetry; nuʾy are trenches dug around a tent pitched in the desert to take runoff from rain water; the athāfī are the three stones placed under a cooking pot as trivets; dawāris are the traces of a campsite (such as that formerly containing the beloved); ẓawāʿin are covered camel litters in which women ride.

384 “in origin they mean ‘of unpleasant appearance’”: the Qāmūs says: “al-basl [sic] means… the man who is of unpleasant appearance.”

385 “All good things come to those who wait…. And every good thing should make love” (kullu ātin qarīb… wa-kullu qarībin ātin): the first phrase (literally, “everything that is near is coming”) is a proverb, which the Fāriyāqiyyah then twists by taking ātin, active participle of atā “to come,” in another of its senses, namely, “to have intercourse with” (cf. Q Shuʿarāʾ 26:165).

386 “such a ‘universal’ statement” (bi-hādhihi l-kulliyyah): as earlier (see Volume Two, 2.18.4n280), Aristotelian logic is invoked.

387 “all” (jamīʿan): i.e., the Fāriyāq, the Fāriyāqiyyah, and their child.

388 “the greatest of their poets”: from the muʿallaqah, or “suspended ode,” of Imruʾ al-Qays (translation: Arberry, Seven Odes, 63).

389 “the quintessence and best part of blood is of that color” (khulāṣata l-dami wa-ṣafwatahu huwa fī dhālika l-lawn): according to Aristotle, semen is formed from blood.

390 “So that’s the reason!” (fa-hādhā huwa l-sababu idhan): i.e., the people of London like the color white because it is the color of semen.

391 “Now the truth has come to light” (al-āna qad ḥaṣḥaṣa l-ḥaqq): Q Yūsuf 12:51.

392 “the red” (al-aḥmar): presumably meaning, in light of the preceding, “semen.”

393 “Great indeed / is women’s guile” (īnna kayda l-nisāʾi kāna ʿaẓīman): reminiscent of Q Yūsuf 12:28.

394 “even if their promenading is leading them at that very moment to trial and litigation before His Honor the Judge”: i.e., “even if they are in the process of taking one another to court.”

395 “seeking to ‘mix the rough with the smooth’” (ṭalaban li-l-murāzamah): perhaps to be taken in the sense of the saying of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb idhā akaltum rāzimū (“When ye eat… mix ye, in your eating, what is soft with what is hard”) (Lane, Lexicon), the emphasis here being not on texture, however, but on variety.

396 “food for two will satisfy three” (ṭaʿāma thnayni yushbiʿu thalāthah): reminiscent of the hadith ṭaʿāmu thnayni kāfī thalāthah wa-ṭaʿāmu l-thalāthati kāfī l-arbaʿah (“the food of two is enough for three and the food of three for four”).

397 “and give him hope” (wa-tumannīhi): or, punningly, “make him produce semen.”

398 I.e., “When the husband hears that his neighbor devours his (i.e., his neighbor’s) wife’s lips and lies with her under her shift, so that she (the husband’s wife) neither dreams of the neighbor nor he (the neighbor) of her (the husband’s wife).”

399 “the swooning prude” (al-rabūkh): “the woman who faints during intercourse” (Qāmūs).

400 “back-passage bleeder” (al-salaqlaq): “the woman who menstruates through her anus” (Qāmūs).

401 “the single-barreled bawd” (al-sharīm): “the woman who has had so much intercourse that her two passages [the vagina and the rectum] have become one” (Qāmūs).

402 “play the mooning she-camel that lives its false calf to lick, for I see curly shavings on the fire stick” (fa-ttakhidhī mudhi l-yawmi ẓīrā fa-ʾinnī arā fī l-zan(a)di īrā): a ẓīr is “one [esp. a she-camel] that inclines to, or affects, the young one of another, and suckles [or fosters] it” (Lane, Lexicon, quoting the Qāmūs); zand (“fire stick”) may also be read as zanad (“a stone wrapped up in pieces of rag… which is stuffed into a she-camel’s vulva, when she is made to take a liking to the young one of another” [Lane, Lexicon, quoting the Qāmūs]); īr “shavings” may also be read as ayr (“penis”), in which case the second clause may be taken to mean “for I see a penis in [place of] the stone wrapped in rags that takes the place, etc.”

403 In 1850 the author sent Queen Victoria an ode in her praise which he also had translated into English and published at his own expense as a broadsheet; however, he received neither acknowledgment nor reward for his pains (see Arberry, “Fresh Light” and Arabic Poetry, 136ff, both of which reproduce the Arabic text and Arberry’s translation).

404 “the Austrians of Schiller”: Schiller was born and died in states that were part of the Holy Roman Empire and he might be better described as German; perhaps the author was influenced by the fact that during the period covered by this book, the Austrian Empire (1804–67) was the largest and strongest member of the German Confederation, ergo the most prominent German-speaking state.

405 “rhyme-consonants and rhymes” (al-rawīy wa-l-qāfiyah): the rawīy is the final consonant at the end of a line of verse and thus “the essential part of the rhyme” (Wright: Grammar II:352); the qāfiyah is the combination of consonants and vowels that constitute the sonic effect. Both are governed by complex rules.

406 The author appears to have in mind the license required (in England, for instance, from the Lord Chamberlain) before writers such as Shakespeare could perform their works.

407 From the muʿallaqah (“suspended ode”) of Imruʾ al-Qays (mid-sixth century AD; translation Arberry, Seven Odes, 62); the reference is to a woman who tends to her baby while having intercourse with the poet.

408 From the muʿallaqah (“suspended ode”) of ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād (mid-sixth century AD; translation Arberry, Seven Odes, 182).

409 “the August Master”: i.e., the ruler of Tunis.

410 “my eulogy of Our Lord the Emir”: i.e., of the ruler of Tunis (this eulogy is not reproduced in the book).

411 “One of those ancient delusions of yours” (min ḍalālika l-qadīm): cf. Q Ṭā Hā 20:95 qālū ta-llāhi innaka la-fī ḍalālika l-qadīm (“They said, ‘By God, you still persist in your old delusions!’”), said by the sons of Yaʿqūb (Jacob) to the latter when he persisted in believing that Yūsuf (Joseph) would return.

412 “the three”: i.e., sensual pleasure, this world, and the next.

413 “hakhakah”: “copiousness of intercourse” (Qāmūs).

414 “a reduplicative formed from hakka hakka” (muḍāʿif hakka hakka): Arabic allows the formation of new, quadriliteral, verbs from simple geminate verbs such as hakka (“to have sexual intercourse with a woman with force or with frequency”) (Qāmūs) with intensifying effect; the other verbs that follow all mean “to have sexual intercourse with” (though hanā has not been found in the lexica, it presumably derives from han(ah), “thing” or “vagina”).

415 “the ones that preceded it”: i.e., the verbs meaning “(plain, one-goper-session) intercourse” (biʿāl, mubāʿalah) cited above.

416 “corruption” (khamaj): or, punningly, “lassitude.”

417 “those things the Franks wear down to their waists” (hādhihi llatī talbisuhā l-ifrinju ‘ilā khuṣurihim): i.e., jackets.

418 “a bin… platter” (al-quffah… al-ṣaffūt): the following list is shorter than that of words meaning kinds of basket or other containers (see 5.2.11) in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

419 “though not in terms of his specific attributes but as an example of the attributes of the absolute” (lā bi-l-ṣifati l-ʿayyinati bal bi-l-ṣifati l-muṭlaqah): i.e., as a representative of his sex in general, not because of his individual traits.

420 “her bedmate… her intimate” (kamīʿahā… wa-khalīlahā): the following list is shorter than that of words of the highly productive faʿīl pattern (see 5.2.12) in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

421 “clapper-board” (nāqūs): a wooden board or plank functioning, when struck with a mallet, as a gong.

422 Cf. the Qāmūs, III:377.

423 “Your friend” (ṣāḥibuka): the Fāriyāqiyyah picks up on the Fāriyāq’s earlier reference to “the author of the Qāmūs” as ṣāḥib al-Qāmūs but understands the word in its more vernacular meaning of “friend.”

424 “language is a female” (al-lughatu unthā): the Fāriyāqiyyah appears to be unaware that the word for “feminine” as a grammatical gender category is muʾannath while unthā refers to sexual gender.

425 “which are neither voweled nor unvoweled” (wa-hiya laysat mina l-ḥarakati wa-lā l-sukūn): meaning perhaps, “which are free of the male-constructed constraints of language.”

426 “Conversation’s carpet… reach its end… End of Days” (fa-ʿinnamā huwa bisāṭ ḥadīth qad nushira fa-lā yuṭwā ḥattā naṣila ilā ākhirihā): in the Arabic, the pun turns on the two meanings of the verb nashara: “to unroll” and “to resurrect.”

427 “desert rose” (jarāz): a plant (Adenium obesum) distinguished by its “stout, swollen basal caudex” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenium_obesum).

428 “removing facial hair using a thread” (al-taḥaffuf): probably meaning the use of a doubled thread, looped around the fingers, whose ends are held between the beautician’s teeth and which is worked by moving the head back and forth, causing the threads to revolve and thus catch and pluck out the hairs, as practiced in Egypt today.

429 “the pelvic egg” (bayḍat al-ʿuqr): according to the Lisān, an egg laid by a cockerel, used, because of its softness and delicacy, to test the virginity of slave girls.

430 “such things not being considered speech by the grammarians” (wahwa ʿinda l-nuḥāti laysa bi-kalām): in grammatical theory, the term kalām (“speech”) is properly bestowed only on statements that are mufīdah (“information-bearing”), i.e., that convey a complete thought and are thus meaningful; the author misrepresents this concept to include within it statements such as his earlier ones concerning women that are, according to his assertion, too banal and obvious to be regarded as information-bearing, and which fail, therefore, to qualify as true speech.

431 “[having] a clean-plucked beard and a pocket with a hole in it” (mantūf al-liḥyah mukharraq al-jayb): perhaps meaning “destitute, taken to the cleaners” (by his wife).

432 “our friend” (ṣāḥibinā): i.e., his future employer, for whom they are bound.

433 “Perhaps… excitement” (laʿalla… al-tashwīq): meaning perhaps that the thought of finding men (even mad ones) out on the streets in England and not closeted in their houses is responsible for her excitement at being there.

434 “a city thronging with men”: i.e., Cambridge (cf. 4.4.2 and 4.5.7).

435 “the village for which they were bound”: see 4.10.7n55.

436 “Man is a creature of haste” (khuliqa l-inṣanu min ʿajal): Q Anbiyāʾ 21:37.

437 “Would you be kind enough to explain them to me?” (fa-hal laka an tuwaqqifanī ʿalayh): in his response, the Fāriyāq pretends to understand these words in an alternative sense: “Would you be kind enough to stick me on it?”

438 “cheap girls who laugh till they’re fit to bust… the unjust” (al-tāghiyāt… al-ṭāghiyāt): the Fāriyāqiyyah mishears the t of tāghiyāt (“slave girls who try to hide their laughter but are overcome by it”) as the ṭ of ṭāghiyāt (“[female] oppressors”).

439 “snacking… unenthusiastically” (naʾj… tamaṣṣuṣ): the following list of words referring to “tasting” and “sipping” (see 5.2.12) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

440 “sedateness… sanctimony” (al-tarazzun… al-tanaẓẓuf): the following list of words referring to “reticence,” “wariness,” and “caution” (see 5.2.12) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

441 “expose their backsides to warm them up” (kashf adbārihim li-l-iṣṭilāʾ): the image evoked is that of a man standing in front of a fireplace and raising his coattails.

442 “my armpit when he stretched out his body” (rufghī idhā mā sbaṭarrā): or, “my cunny when he lay down flat” (see the Qāmūs: al-rufgh “the armpit, or the area around a woman’s vulva” and isbaṭarrā “he laid down, or extended himself” and sibaṭr “the lion when it extends its body on leaping”).

443 “their hands concealed / In skins” (wa-l-rāḥu minhunna bi-l-jildi mustatirātun): i.e., “wearing gloves.”

444 “she spears” (wa-taʾkhudhu… bi-l-mishakkah): presumably meaning the old woman referred to at the start of the poem, the abruptness of the shift of subject being attributable to the missing lines.

445 “privacy… wife” (ḥurmatahu): ḥurmah means both “sanctity, inviolability” and “wife.”

446 “our friends”: i.e., the English.

447 The Fāriyāq’s translation appears to assume that the verses are addressed by a woman to a man, though the switch from first person (suʾlī ʿindak) to third (wa-blugh… minhā) is problematic; some elements of the equally baffling English are missing from the Fāriyāq’s translation.

448 “he’s complaining of himself” (huwa yashkū min nafsih): apparently meaning that the poet is implying that he is incapable of satisfying the woman.

449 “turnips” (qulqās): see 4.1.10n4.

45 °Cf. Deut. 7:13 “And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.”

451 Jephthah the Gileadite: see Judg. 11:1 “Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valor, and he was the son of an harlot” and 11:29ff.

452 “or so the theologians assert” (kamā afādahu l-mutakallimūn): the allusion is to the discussion among theologians of who — God or man — is responsible for evil, the Muʿtazilites, for example, claiming that man is responsible, the Ashʿarites, God, although the author appears to have either forgotten that the standard terms are ḥasan (rather than jamīl) for “good” and qabīḥ for “evil,” or else has adapted the argument to his ongoing concern with the physically beautiful (jamīl) and the ugly (qabīḥ).

453 “well-endowed in both senses” (al-jihāzān): jihāz means both “dowry” and “genitalia.”

454 “nothing of that greenness brings a flush of good cheer” (lā shayʾa min hādhihi l-khuḍrati yubayyiḍu l-wajh): literally, “nothing of that greenness whitens the face,” “whitening of the face” being a familiar trope.

455 See Volume One, 1.13.2n219.

456 “confines himself to ‘the little nest’” (yuḥaffishu): the author appears to be reading the laconic definition of taḥfīsh that he quotes (from the Qāmūs) in the light of another found in the same entry there, namely, ḥifsh, meaning “vagina.”

457 “a fastness… dry” (manzahan… al-māʾ): a basic meaning of the root n-z-h is “to be distant” and especially “to be distant from anything unpleasant”; however, the Qāmūs highlights certain collocations in which the sense is specifically “to be distant from water.”

458 “viceroy to the Creator of Nations” (khalīfat bārī l-umam): i.e., the Ottoman caliph.

459 “hands free, his cuffs unsoiled” (yaduhu khafīfah rānifatuhu naẓīfah): probably meaning that he can go home without passing by the market first to burden himself with food items demanded by his wife and getting his cuffs dirty.

460 “like a bad penny” (sayra l-ʿajāj fī kulli fujāj): literally, “like flying dust in every mountain pass.”

461 The poem that follows only gets around to comparing the married state with bachelorhood in its last lines (4.13.8), perhaps not surprisingly given that it was not written as a response to al-Hāwif ibn Hifām’s question; earlier lines seem to reflect the Fāriyāq’s anxieties about the pressures to which his own marriage was subject in foreign environments.

462 “his money” (filsihi): or, colloquially and punningly, “his anus.”

463 “his spine, / His resuscitator from misery”: alluding to the belief that semen is generated in the spine.

464 “The stranger… folk” (inna l-gharība… jinsihi): the “stranger” is presumably the one, referred to above, who marries in a small village, i.e., not in his hometown, but the wider meaning remains elusive.

465 “So long as the advantages of starting over at it / Do not damage the ending of what was good” (mā in yaḍurra khitāma mā / qad ṭāba nāfiʿu rassihi): perhaps meaning “Do not become so attracted to the pleasures of initiating new marriages that you end earlier ones badly.”

466 “And many a mother and child…” (wa-rubba ummin wa-ṭiflin…): the quotation is from an elegy for al-Andalus written by Abū l-Baqāʾ al-Rundī (601/1204 to 684/1285).

467 Num. 31:15–17: “And Moses said unto them… Now therefore kill every male among the little ones.”

468 “Death’s rule on Man’s imposed…. This world for permanence can furnish no abode” (ḥukmu l-maniyyati fī l-barriyyati jārī…. mā hādhihi l-dunyā bi-dāri qarārī): these two hemistichs, here separated from each other and used as the second half of each of two verses, are taken from and together originally form the first verse of a poem by Abū l-Ḥasan al-Tihāmī al-Ḥasanī (d. 416/1025) composed to mourn the death of the poet’s son at the age of fourteen; al-Shidyāq goes on to quote another well-known verse from the same poem below (“I kept company with my neighbors, he with His Lord— / And how different his neighbors from mine!”—see 4.14.8).

469 “the Fāriyāq had no choice but to live close to that ill-fated village”: because it was where he was working; see 4.4.1n55.

470 “Two weak things will conquer a stronger” (wa-ḍaʿīfāni yaghlibāni qawiyyan): the words are by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (667/1278 to ca. 750/1349) (in the original fa-ḍaʿīfāni); the preceding hemistich runs lā tuḥārib bi-nāẓirayka fuʾādī (“Do not wage war with your eyes on my heart”).

471 “to peer… meditate” (al-ṣaʾṣaʾah… al-tarannī): the following list of words relating to “looking and its various forms” (see 5.2.12) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

472 “from a drop of mingled fluid” (min nuṭfatin amshājin): cf. Q Insān 76:2.

473 Ashʿab: i.e., Ashʿab ibn Jubayr (born 9/630–31, died during the reign of al-Mahdī, 158/775 to 169/785), whose greed became the subject of many anecdotes.

474 qalb (“heart”) is from the same root as the verbs meaning “to turn, transmute,” etc., a fact of which the author has already made full use in this passage, as have numerous poets and writers before him.

475 Hind and Daʿd: stereotypical names of the beloved woman.

476 “The Fāriyāq resumed”: the author appears to have forgotten that the Fāriyāq has not been described earlier as speaking.

477 “aḥaddahā or ḥaddadahā… taḥiddu”: these words are taken from the Qāmūs.

478 “and you know better than I the full sense of that word” (wa-nta bi-tamāmi l-maʿnā adrā): sabd (which is the voweling in the Arabic text) may mean, in addition to the meanings already noted by the author, “wolf” and “calamity”; however, it seems likely that he has in mind the form subad (indistinguishable from the former when short vowels are not written), meaning “the pubes” (al-ʿānah).

479 “a large musical instrument” (ālatu ṭarabin ʿaẓīmah): ālah (“instrument, tool”) is frequently used in a sexual sense.

480 “to vie with me in quoting poetry” (tushāʿiranī): or, punningly, “to sleep under the same blanket with me.”

481 “for I possess the very source from which relief (faraj) is derived” (fainna ʿindī maṣdara shtiqāqi l-faraj): the author plays with the fact that the verbal noun (maṣdar, lit. “source”) of faraja (“to provide relief to someone [of God]”) is farj, which also has the sense of “vagina.”

482 “if he hadn’t at first succeeded, he wouldn’t if he tried again” (inna l-ʿawda ilayhā ghayru aḥmad): a play on the proverb al-ʿawdu aḥmad (see 4.4.6n64).

483 “no metropolitan or monk”: presumably another dig at Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī (see Volume Two, 2.3.5n66 and 2.9.3 and, in this volume, 4.19).

484 “William Scoltock”: matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1842 aged 19, became an inspector of schools, and died 1886. “Williams” in the Arabic is the author’s error.

485 “mature horses run ever longer heats” (jaryu l-mudhakkiyāti ghilāʾ): see al-Maydānī 1:106 (s.v. jaryu… ghilāb).

486 “swan-necked” (al-jūd): in view of the context, this may be a misprint for al-ḥūr (“having eyes like those of gazelles and of cows”) (Lane, Lexicon).

487 “the scrubbers” (al-ḥakkākāt): the true significance of this word becomes clear only at the end of this list (4.16.5).

488 “vibrating… scudding” (tatadhabdhabu… taṣrā): the following list of words meaning “she moves” and/or “she oscillates” (see 5.2.12) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

489 “What a monstrous thing to say!” (laqad kabura qawlan): an echo of the Qurʾān’s kaburat kalimatan takhruju min afwāhihim (“What they say is monstrous; they are merely uttering falsehoods!” (Q Kahf 18:5).

490 “panderation… cuckoldism” (daybūbiyyah… arfaḥiyyah): the following list of words related to “the condition of being a pander or a wittol” (see 5.2.12) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

491 “as it does in this noble language of ours”: according to the Lisān, the (ancient) Arabs used the word ʿatabah (“doorstep”) as an epithet for a woman.

492 “sprinkle white ashes on their heads”: i.e., wear powdered wigs.

493 “slipways… hides” (al-mazālij… al-maṣālī): the following list of words related to “traps, snares, and associated words” (see 5.2.13) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

494 “liquid account” (sayyāl): defined by the Qāmūs simply as “a kind of account/calculation” and not found elsewhere; the translation derives from the base sense of the root.

495 “precautionary blank-filling” (al-tarqīm wa-l-tarqīn): Lane, Lexicon: “A certain sign, or mark, of the keepers of the register of the [tax…] conventionally used by them, put upon… accounts, or reckonings, lest it should be imagined that a blank has been left [to be afterwards filled up], in order that no account be put down therein.”

496 “under the letter yāʾ” (fī bāb al-yāʾ): the primary organizing element of the Qāmūs is the final root consonant; thus words of the root j-dh-y, such as judhāʾ, ought to appear there under yāʾ.

497 “nasality… movingly” (bi-l-ghunnah… wa-l-tarniyah): the following list of words relating to “qualities of voice and setting to music” (see 5.2.13) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword. The list includes a number of technical terms from Arabic phonetics and prosody and the science of Qurʾanic recitation that by definition have no equivalents in English.

498 “the curling of the hair, its… rumpling” (taqṣību l-shaʿr… wa-taghbiyatuhu): the following list of words relating to “hair dressing and its styles” (see 5.2.13) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

499 “the kuʿkubbah and the muqaddimah”: the kuʿkubbah is a way of wearing braids (see Volume Three, 3.9.1n106); the muqaddimah is defined in the Qāmūs as “a way of combing the hair.”

500 “rigadoon” (rīdūqā): the identification is tentative.

501 “in abject submission” (qalbuhu bayna rijlayhā): the literal meaning of the phrase is “with his heart between her legs” and both reverses the standard expression bayna yaday… (lit. “between the hands of…” meaning “in front of…, before…”) and allows an obvious sexual reading.

502 “they drop the ends of all the masculine words and pronounce them in the feminine” (yaḥdhifūna fī l-lafẓi awākhira jamīʿi l-alfāẓi l-mudhakkari wa-yanṭuqūna bi-hā fī l-muʾannath): the author was perhaps thinking of a situation such as épicier (“male grocer”) versus épicière (“female grocer”), where the “r” is heard only in the second.

503 “the masculine should take precedence over the feminine” (taghlīb al-mudhakkar ʿalā l-muʾannath): probably a reference to the rule that in any plural group, if even one masculine element is introduced, the entire group is treated as masculine plural (example: les filles et les garçons sont venus [“the girls and boys have come”]), where venus has the masculine form.

504 “languorousness… litheness” (al-wanā… al-inthiṭāʾ): the following list of words relating to “limpness and rigidity” (see 5.2.13) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

505 “that other quality mentioned by Abū Nuwās in his poem rhyming in the glottal stop”: the poet has several poems with this rhyme letter; a likely candidate is the one that begins daʿ ʿanka lawmī fa-l-lawmu ighrāʾu / wa-dāwinī bi-llatī kānat hiya l-dāʾu (“Leave off your blaming of me, for blame is itself an incitement / And treat me with that which was the very disease [of which you accuse me]!”); in this case, the quality attributed to some of the women of Paris would be, presumably, a willingness to engage in anal intercourse as, in line 3 of this poem, Abū Nuwās speaks of receiving wine min kaffi dhāti ḥirin fī ziyyi dhī dhakarin / lahā muḥibbāni lūṭiyyun wa-zannāʾū (“from the hand of one with a vagina in the dress of one with a penis, who has two lovers, one a sodomite, the other an adulterer”) (Abū Nuwās, Dīwān, 7).

506 “is no insult” (laysa mina l-sabbi fī sayʾ): an acquaintance seems to be assumed with the following entry in the Qamūs under b-ẓ-r: huwa yumiṣṣuhu wa-yubaẓẓiruhu ay qāla lahu umṣuṣ baẓrata fulānah (“yumiṣṣuhu and yubaẓẓiruhu mean, ‘He tells him, “Suck such and such a woman’s clitoris!”’”), in which umṣuṣ etc. seems to have the force of an insult; the point here, of course, is that it is no insult to say this in Paris because its “old experienced men” do indeed practice cunnilingus.

507 See the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch (Epistle of Jeremiah) 6:43: “The women also with cords about them, sitting in the ways, burn bran for perfume: but if any of them, drawn by some that passeth by, lie with him, she reproacheth her fellow, that she was not thought as worthy as herself, nor her cord broken.”

508 “thou art among those thankful to her” (wa-nta lahā mina l-shākirīn): echoes a Qurʾanic phrase (without lahā) (Q Anʿām 6:63, Aʿrāf 7:144).

509 “Yet how can a man agree to protect his dependents / With both hanger and horn?” (wa-kayfa yarḍā mraʾun yaḥmī… bi-l-qirni wa-l-qarni): i.e., how can a husband be expected to protect his dependents with his hanger (a type of sword) if his wife’s conduct has rendered him a cuckold with a horn?

510 Umm Khārijah: lit., “the Mother of Khārijah,” a woman from whom many tribes descended and of whom it is said that if any man said to her, “Marry me?” she replied, “Done!” The identity of the father of her son Khārijah, which means “One Who Goes Out Much,” was unknown. The wit of the Arabic comes from its exploitation of the contrasts between dākhilat al-insān (“man’s inner state”), Umm Khārijah (“Mother of Him Who Goes Out”), wa-yakhruju ʿanhu l-ḥilm (“[and] all sense of proportion will leave him [lit., ‘go out from him’]”), and wālijah (“where she’s gone in” or “is being entered”).

511 “Paris is heaven for women, purgatory for men, and hell for horses”: Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1749–1814), French dramatist and commentator, attributes the description of Paris as being le paradis des femmes, le purgatoire des hommes, et l’enfer des chevaux to “the common people” (le petit peuple) (Mercier, Tableau de Paris).

512 “here… they’re forever being touched” (shaʾnahunna dawāmu l-ṭamth): echoes the Qurʾān’s ḥūrun maqṣūrātun fī l-khiyāmi… lam yaṭmithhunna insun… wa-lā jānn (“[in Paradise are] pure companions sheltered in pavilions… whom neither a man nor a jinn… has ever touched” (Q Raḥmān 55:72/Muddaththir 74:72).

513 “squint-eyed… pinguecula” (aḥwal… mudanqishan): the following list of words relating to “persons with defective vision” (see 5.2.13) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

514 “skin flap” (zanamah): the author returns to a figurative conceit used in Volume Two (see 2.9.1).

515 “A Complaint and Complaints” (Fī shakāh wa-shakwā): the two words derive from the same root and are essentially synonymous, but the first must be used here in a medical sense and refer to the Fāriyāqiyyah’s sore feet (4.18.1) and the second to her complaints about Paris (4.18.2ff).

516 “and what shall teach thee what is ‘the Maid’?” (wa-mā adrāka mā l-khādimah): an ironic play on a rhetorical device occurring in passages in the Qurʾān such as wa-ma adrāk mā l-ḥāqqah (“And what shall teach thee what is the Indubitable?”) (Q Ḥāqqah 69:3; trans. Arberry, Koran) in which a term deemed significant but little known is highlighted.

517 “Cremorne, Vauxhall… Rosherville”: Cremorne Gardens, a proprietary place of entertainment on the Thames in Chelsea, opened in 1845 and closed in 1877; Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall, opened before 1660 and closed in 1859 and was the best-known pleasure garden in London; Rosherville Gardens, at Gravesend, Kent, on the Thames, opened in 1837 and closed in 1911.

518 “the woman with lupus” (al-dhaʾbah): the word is problematic: as spelled in the Arabic text, it does not appear in the lexica; however, the term al-dhiʾbah is used in modern medicine (but only since the early twentieth century, according to Arabic Wikipedia) in the sense of “lupus” (an autoimmune connective tissue disease that affects women more than men and leaves disfiguring scars, often on the face). I have read it tentatively as al-dhaʾibah meaning, by analogy, “the woman with lupus.”

519 “pissoirs… tent pegs” (al-manāṣiʿ… al-manādif): the mindaf referred to in the Arabic is a “cotton-carder’s bow,” i.e., a device resembling a single-stringed harp, about a meter in length and held between the carder’s thighs.

520 the Société Asiatique: established in 1822, the society publishes the Journal asiatique.

521 Étienne Marc Quatremère (1782–1857), student of Silvestre de Sacy, philologist and prolific translator and editor of Arabic texts, and frequent contributor to the Journal asiatique.

522 Armand-Pierre Caussin de Perceval (1795–1871) became professor of modern Arabic at the École spéciale des langues orientales in 1821 and professor of Arabic at the Collège de France in 1833. Earlier, he had worked as a dragoman in Aleppo; in 1828, he published a Grammaire arabe vulgaire based on the dialect of that city.

523 Joseph Toussaint Reinaud (not Reineaud as in the Arabic) (1795–1867) succeeded to Silvestre de Sacy’s chair at the École spéciale des langues orientales on the latter’s death in 1838; see also 5.5 below.

524 “like the definite article in the sentence ‘Go to the market and buy meat’” (ka-adāti l-taʿrīfi fī qawlika idhhab ilā l-sūqi wa-shtiri l-laḥm): i.e., his acquaintance with these French scholars was nonspecific, or impersonal, just as the definite articles preceding sūq and laḥm serve to indicate that the following noun is generic (i.e., “Go to any market and buy any meat”).

525 “with virtue furnished… a vaginal furnace” (bi-l-khayri qamīnuna ḥariyyūn… qamīnun ḥiriyy): the phrases qamīnun bi- and ḥariyyun bi- both mean “capable of” while qamīn means “a bathhouse furnace” and ḥiriyy is an adjective derived from ḥir (“vagina”); the consonantal ductus is the same in both senses.

526 “the women” (al-nisāʾ): “women” has to be understood as “public women” (see below).

527 “of whatever kind” (min takhālufi anwāʿihā): meaning apparently “whether private houses or brothels.”

528 “firetraps” (balw al-nār): the translation is tentative.

529 “full of artifice… treacherous” (al-mallādhūn… al-badhlākhiyyūn): the following list of words relating to “insincere friends,” “false flatterers,” and “those whose friendship cannot be relied upon” (see 5.2.13) is shorter than that in the original and is intended as a representation, not a one-to-one translation, of the latter using words from the same semantic areas drawn from thesauri, dictionaries, and other lexical resources; see further Volume Four, Translator’s Afterword.

530 ʿUrqūb: a giant, ʿUrqūb ibn Maʿbad ibn Asad, who was known as the biggest liar of his day; according to the Qāmūs, “Once a man came to him for alms and he said, ‘When my palm trees grow,’ and when the palm trees grew, he said, ‘When they put forth dates,’ and when they put forth dates, he said, ‘When they flower,’ and when they flowered, he said, ‘When they soften,’ and when they softened, he said, ‘When they dry,’ and when they dried, he cut them at night and gave the man nothing.”

531 “sucking their fingers after eating, and licking off what is on them” (yamṣuṣna aṣābiʿahunna baʿda l-akli wa-yalḥasna mā ʿahayhā): the definition is quoted from the Qāmūs (s.v. rajul laṭṭāʿ).

532 “men with heavy loads” (aṣḥāb al-athqāl): this apparently contradictory statement should perhaps be understood as sexual innuendo.

533 Syria (al-Shām): the word may denote either the city of Damascus or the surrounding lands over which it traditionally has held sway.

534 “the most generous of the Arab nation” (akram al-ʿarab): an allusion to the ruler of Tunis, Aḥmad Bāy, who had earlier, in response to poems written in his praise by the Fāriyāq (i.e., the author), sent him a gift of diamonds (Volume Three, 3.18.6) and subsequently hosted him and his family in Tunis (4.8.1–7).

535 “When the Christians of Aleppo suffered their calamity” (lammā nukibat naṣārā Ḥalab): in October of 1850, a Muslim mob turned on the Christian quarters of Aleppo and up to seventy persons died; a further five thousand Aleppines died as a result of bombardment by Ottoman forces seeking to retake the city.

536 Fatḥallāh Marrāsh: presumably the father of Faransīs Fatḥallāh Marrāsh (1836–73), who was a leading intellectual and writer of his day and whom the author later met (see Volume One, Foreword, p. xv).

537 Metropolitan Atanāsiyūs al-Tutūnjī: see further Volume Two, 2.3.5n66, 2.9.3.

538 “some town belonging to Austria — Bologna, I think” (baladun min bilādi ūstiriyā wa-hwa fī-mā aẓunnu Būlūniyā): Bologna, though at this time a Papal Legation, was garrisoned by Austrian soldiers.

539 “the Sassanian trade” (al-ḥirfah al-Sāsāniyyah): i.e., the trade of the Banū Sāsān (“Sons of Sāsān”), a name applied in medieval Islam to charlatans, vagabonds, and thieves, supposedly because of their original allegiance to a mythical “Shaykh Sāsān.”

540 Islāmbūl: literally, “Find Islam,” a folk-etymological adaptation of Istanbul introduced following the Muslim conquest of the city in 1453 to emphasize the centrality of the city, in its rulers’ eyes, to the Islamic nation.

541 Ṣubḥī Bayk: later to hold, as Ṣubḥī Pasha, the posts of minister of education and governor of Syria; the author benefited from this contact when he himself settled in Istanbul (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, II:902).

542 For the poem in praise of Ṣubḥī Bayk, see 4.20.29–32; for those describing his longing for his wife, see 4.20.50–62.

543 “those decorated pieces of paper” (hādhihi l-awrāq al-muzawwaqah): i.e., playing cards; from the references to gambling and a partner that follow (and that are elaborated in his later poem on the subject, see 4.20.39–43), he likely played whist, a popular game with gamblers in Paris at the time (see, e.g., Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, first published in 1835).

544 “the gamblers’ record keeper” (amīn al-muqāmirīn): the definition is from the Qāmūs.

545 I.e., 1853, the year of the outbreak of the Crimean War, which began in October.

546 See 4.9.10.

547 “the aforementioned poem”: i.e., that presented by the author to Prince Musurus (see 4.20.2).

548 “Sweden… some latter-day Peter”: in the Great Northern War (1700–21), Peter the Great of Russia successfully contested the hegemony of the Swedish Empire in northern Europe.

549 “Muslims, check well…” (yā muslimūna tathabbatū…): cf Q Ḥujurāt 49:6 yā ayyuhā lladhīna āmanū in jāʾakum fāsiqun bi-nabaʾin fa-tabayyanū (“Believers, if an evildoer brings you news, ascertain the correctness of the report fully”).

550 “You will not attain piety until you expend / Of what you love” (lan tanālū l-birra ḥattā tunfiqū / mimmā tuḥibbūn): Q Āl ʿImrān 3:92 (trans. Arberry, Koran, 57).

551 “the most firm handle” (al-ʿurwah al-wuthqā): “So whosoever disbelieves in idols and believes in God has laid hold of the most firm handle” (Q Baqarah 2:256; similarly Luqmān 31:22).

552 “and peck the feathers off their eagle” (wa-nisrahumu nsurū): an allusion to the double eagle of the imperial Russian insignia.

553 “Were you but a small band of soldiers, / They would not be overcome” (law lam yakun minkum siwā nafarin lamā / ghulibū): cf Q Anfāl 8:65 wa-in yakun minkum miʾatun yaghlibū alfan (“and if there are a hundred of you, they will overcome a thousand”).

554 “the Portioned Narration” (al-dhikr al-mufaṣṣal): “an appellation of The portion of the Kur-án from [the chapter entitled] [i. e. ch. xlix.] to the end; according to the most correct opinion…; this portion is thus called because of its many divisions between its chapters… or because of the few abrogations therein” (Lane, Lexicon, s.v. mufaṣṣal).

555 “It was ever a duty upon us to help them” (haqqan ʿalaynā naṣruhum): cf. wa-kāna haqqan ʿalaynā naṣru l-muʾminīn (“And it was ever a duty upon us, to help the believers”) (Q Rūm 30:47).

556 “and they cannot / Advance that day or delay it” (fa-lan / yastaqdimū ʿanhu wa-lan yastaʾkhirū): cf. Q Naḥl 16:61 fa-idhā jāʾahum ajaluhum lā yastaʾkhirūna sāʿatan wa-lā yastaqdimūn (“when their time [i.e., the time of living creatures] comes they cannot delay it for an hour, nor can they bring it forward”).

557 “A manifest victory” (fatḥan mubīnan): Q Fatḥ 48:1.

558 “Gardens of Eternity” (jannātu ʿadan): Q Tawbah 9:72 and passim.

559 Badr: site of a battle (2/624) between the Muslim forces and the much larger army of the Prophet’s opponents; the Muslims’ victory was a turning point in their fortunes and is often attributed to divine intervention.

560 “their circling eagle” (nisruhum al-mudawwimu): see 4.20.6n260.

561 “the crescent moon” (al-hilāl): an allusion to the crescent of the imperial Ottoman insignia.

562 “birds in flights” (al-ṭayr al-abābīl): the reference is to God’s destruction of an Ethiopian army that sought to take Mecca in the days before Islam (Q Fīl 105:3).

563 “You we worship” (iyyāka naʿbudu): the words are taken from the opening sūrah (“chapter”) of the Qurʾān, often recited at the initiation of an enterprise.

564 “And any spiteful gelding who hates you” (wa-shāniʾuka l-baghīḍu l-abtarū): echoes Q Kawthar 108:3.

565 “Farūq… the Furqān”: the epithet Farūq probably means “sharply dividing” (by analogy with other intensive adjectives of this form such as laʿūb [“very playful”] and ḥasūd [“very envious”]), though the dictionaries do not give it this sense, and reflects the idea that, previous to its conquest by the Ottomans, the city represented the divide between the Christian and Muslim worlds; the author appears to share this view as he derives it from al-Furqān, an epithet of the Qurʾān, so called because it “makes a separation… between truth and falsity” (Lane, Lexicon).

566 “The stringing of the pearls… your palm” (mā in yafī naẓmu l-laʾāliʾi… tuntharū): i.e., using conventional imagery, “The arrangement of lines of verses into a eulogy for you cannot match the gifts that are dispensed from your hand’s generous supply.”

567 “two Hijri dates” (tārīkhayni hijriyyayni): i.e., the author has used the system known as ḥisāb al-jummal, which allots a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet, to construct the final line of the poem, each of whose hemistichs consists of letters whose values add up to 1270 (the Hijri year that began on 4 October 1853), as follows: ʿAbd (70 + 2 + 4 = 76) + al-Majīd (1 + 30 + 40 + 3 + 10 + 4=88) + Allāh (1 + 30 + 30 + 5 = 66) + arkā (1 + 200 + 20 + 10 = 231) + ḍiddahu (800 + 9 = 809) = 1270 and so on for the remaining hemistich; hisāb al-jummal values may be found in Hava, al-Farāʾid, 4 (unnumbered).

568 “The Presumptive Poem… The Prescriptive Poem” (al-Qaṣīdah al-Harfiyyah… al-Qaṣīdah al-Ḥarfiyyah): see 4.18.6 above.

569 “litters” (hawādij): throughout these two poems, the author presses words from the early Arabic lexicon, including Qurʾanic terms, into the service of contemporary purposes; here, presumably, the women’s camel litter stands for the enclosed carriage.

570 “a ʿIlliyyūn”: a word used in the Qurʾān (Q Muṭaffifīn 83:19) and said to mean “a place in the Seventh Heaven, to which ascend the souls of the believers” (Qāmūs).

571 “raised couches” (surur marfūʿah): cf. Q Ghāshiyah 88:13.

572 “cotton mattresses” (aʿārīs): the translation is tentative; the word appears not to be attested in the lexica but may be an invented plural of the plural ʿarānīs (a word which according to Ibn ʿAbbād has no singular) meaning something like “things made by women out of cotton” and associated with beds: see al-ʿUbāb al-Zākhir in http://www.baheth.info, s.v. ʿirnās (ʿirnās al-marʾah mawḍiʿu sabāʾikh quṭnihā) and Lane, Lexicon, s.v. sabīkh, at end.

573 “the Uplifted Ones” (al-simākayn): Arcturus and Spica, two unusually bright stars.

574 “be delighted… Tunis” (fa-tuʾnasu minhā wa-hiya Tūnusu ghibṭatan): a pun based on the identical forms of the words tuʾnasu (“may you be delighted”) and Tūnusu (“Tunis”) when written without vowels.

575 “the Destroyer of All Pleasures” (hādim al-ladhdhāt): i.e., death.

576 “even should you travel so far that Jupiter lies behind you in the sky” (wa-law amsā warāʾaka Birjīsū): perhaps an allusion to the use of Jupiter as a reference point in celestial navigation.

577 “a geomancer’s spell” (inkīs): literally, a certain sign used by geomancers (see Volume One, 1.16.9).

578 “For if you add a zero to it, even an odd number becomes divisible by five” (fa-fī ṣ-ṣifri li-l-fardi l-ʿaqīmi takhāmīsū): perhaps meaning “so too an hour in Paris will make your life longer (for better or for worse) by orders of magnitude.”

579 “oceans” (qawāmīs): and, punningly, “dictionaries.”

580 “though it is studied” (wa-hwa madrūsū): or, punningly, “and has been erased.”

581 The poem is referred to earlier as having been written on the occasion of a visit by Emir ʿAbd al-Qādir to Paris, when the author “was honored by being invited to attend a gathering in his presence” (4.19.4); however, from references within the poem, it would seem that the relationship was more extended and included the emir’s standing the author up on at least one occasion.

582 “drowsiness… lukewarm” (bi-fātir… bil-fātir): seductive faces are conventionally described as having “drowsy” eyes or eyelids, using the same word as for “lukewarm, neither hot nor cold.”

583 “my creator” (fāṭirī): an apparent reference to the Qurʾanic verses “then we split the earth in fissures / and therein made the grass to grow” (thumma shaqaqna l-arḍa shaqqan / fa-nbatnā fīhā ḥabban), Q ʿAbasa 80:26–27, which is preceded by references to God’s role as creator, e.g., “Of a sperm-drop He created him” (min nuṭfatin khalaqahu), 80:19.

584 “night phantom” (ṭayf): the appearance of the beloved as a shimmering figure in the lover’s dreams is a standard trope.

585 “the Assembler” (al-ḥāshir): i.e., God, who will assemble men for judgment on the Last Day.

586 “word… consonant… sword-edge” (ḥarf… ḥarf… ḥarf): a triple pun.

587 “the emir became still” (sakana l-amīr): by the time the author met Emir ʿAbd al-Qādir, the latter had abandoned his struggle against the French colonization of Algeria and was living in exile.

588 “the Tablet” (al-lawḥ): “the Preserved Tablet” (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ), on which God has written divine destiny.

589 “from Ṣubḥī” (min Ṣubḥī): or, punningly, “from my [rising in the] morning.”

590 Ḥassān: i.e., Ḥassān ibn Thābit al-Anṣārī (d. probably before 40/661), the poet most associated with the Prophet Muḥammad, on whom he wrote eulogies.

591 “what I owe is [written] at the top of the board and cannot be erased” (alladhī ʿalay-ya bi-aʿlā l-lawḥi mā huwa bi-l-mamḥī): perhaps meaning “the sins (of eulogizing unworthy persons) for which I must pay expiation are plain for all to see.”

592 “Sāmī of the Summits” (Sāmī al-dhurā): a reference to Ṣubḥī Bayk’s father, Sāmī Pasha; however, since sāmī means “elevated,” the phrase may also be read as “high-peaked.”

593 “a cave of strength” (kahfa ʿizzin): the image, conventional in poetry, echoes references in the Qurʾān to God’s protection of believing young men in a cave, e.g., fa-ʾwū ilā l-kahfi yanshur lakum rabbukum min raḥmatihi wa-yuhayyiʾ min amrikum mirfaqan (“Take refuge in the cave; your Lord will extend his mercy to you and will make fitting provision for you in your situation”) (Q Kahf 18:16).

594 “Halt” (qif): the poem uses the conventions of the pre-Islamic ode in opening by apostrophizing an unnamed companion, who is asked to halt his camel at the abandoned campsite, identifiable by the “orts” (al-ṭulūl) (the remains of the eating, drinking, and sleeping places) of the poet’s beloved’s clan; thereafter, the poet shifts his attention from his companion to himself, which explains the shift of subject from second to first person (“Halt… I knew… I dragged” etc.).

595 “the Crown” (al-iklīlā): defined in the Qāmūs as “a mansion of the moon — four aligned stars.”

596 “after a tear of mine had wetted it” (wa-qad ballathu minnī ʿabratun): the poet appears to picture himself peering through his tears and finding the campsite “borne upon the reins of the wind.”

597 “as dry brushwood” (ka-l-jazl): i.e., of no importance.

598 “The mending of broken hearts may be requested of any Jubārah” (jabru l-khawāṭiri min jubāratin yurtajā): i.e., anyone called Jubārah (or anyone of the Jubārah family) may be asked to mend hearts because the root consonants of his name, i.e., j-b-r, are associated with “restoring, bringing things back to normal, helping back on one’s feet, setting (broken bones).”

599 “A Poem on Gambling” (al-qaṣīdah al-qimāriyyah): the poem seemingly alludes to events referred to earlier (4.19.4). Its vocabulary and syntax are unusually difficult and the translation is in places tentative; choices made in the translation have therefore been more thoroughly endnoted here than elsewhere.

600 “It brought us… together” (jamaʿatnā): it is assumed here that the unexpressed subject of the verb is al-luʿbah (“the game”) or a similar word.

601 “‘the Ace,’ Cavell, and Farshakh” (al-Āṣ wa-Kawall (?) wa-Farshakh): āṣ presumably means “ace,” from the French, and is so used in line 4 of the poem, but here must be a nickname; Kawall is credible as the French/British surname “Cavell”; Farshakh appears to exist as a family name in Lebanon.

602 “One of us” (baʿḍunā): i.e., we were a pair, consisting of a practiced cardplayer and a greenhorn (the poet).

603 “a bit of a dog” (ibn baʿṣī): for baʿṣ the Qāmūs gives the meanings “leanness of body” and “disturbance”; however, usage on the Internet indicates that it has the same meaning as (Egyptian) colloquial baʿbaṣah “goosing.” The translation is contextual.

604 “louis d’ors” (mulūk): literally “kings” but perhaps here “coins with a king’s head on them,” i.e., “sovereigns,” or, given the French setting, as translated above.

605 “he owed” (yudīnuhā): i.e., perhaps, winning back debts he’d incurred.

606 “the pack” (al-muzawwaq): literally, “the decorated thing,” cf. al-awrāq al-muzawwaqah (“[decorated] playing cards”) above (4.19.4).

607 “his hand” (taʾlīfu): literally, “his blend, his mixture.”

608 “In part a seal ring, in part a bezel” (baʿḍuhu khātaman baʿḍuhu ka-faṣṣī): meaning perhaps “part flat but engraved (like an inscribed seal ring; i.e., etched with anger), part bulging (like a curved stone set in a ring; i.e., bulging with fury).”

609 “him” (minhu): reference apparently switches from “the wizard of the pack” to the poet’s overenthusiastic partner on his winning streak.

610 “a true friend” (khilṣī): i.e., his partner, the poet, who would need “covering for” if he is the “greenhorn” referred to at the start of the poem.

611 “stinging” (yaqruṣu): punning on the meanings “to sting” (like an insect) and hence “to speak bitingly,” and “to pinch” (with the fingers).

612 “After forty-six” (baʿda sittin wa-arbaʿīn): i.e., presumably, “after reaching the age of forty-six,” an age that, given his likely birth date of 1805 or 1806 (see Chronology, n488), accords with his stay in Paris between December 1850 and June 1853 (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, I:116); thus the meaning may be that the poet viewed unenthusiastically the prospect of living the rest of his life in poverty as a result of gambling.

613 “he’d not served him in writing notice of any protest” (wa-lam yublighhu ʿan bandati ḥtijājin bi-naṣṣī): the meaning of bandah is not obvious; iḥtijāj is taken here in the sense of “protest regarding nonpayment of a bill”; it is assumed that the subject of “served” is the player who failed to cover for the poet, who therefore by implication involved the pair in losses; the whole may mean that while the poet, though not a skilled player, had joined in the game, he had not expected to become liable for any debts that he and his partner might incur.

614 “All he thought about… whitewash” (fikruhu fī… bi-jiṣṣī): i.e., he was completely preoccupied with the writing of eulogies for persons of elevated station who paid him too little even to allow him to whitewash his room.

615 “gullibility… person” (rubbamā… hirṣī): i.e., perhaps the actual order of the world will be reversed one day and naïve but cautious persons, such as the poet, will in fact benefit from their virtues (but, it is implied, this is not likely to happen soon).

616 “Whenever he tried to write poetry with hairs from his mustache” (wa-bi-shaʿrin min shāribayhi idhā ḥā/wala shiʿran): the image of the poet twisting his mustache when deep in thought was used earlier in the work (see Volume Three, 3.8.5: “he set about playing with his mustache, as was his custom… until he was guided to an understanding of its meaning”). The subsequent use of the feminine pronoun apparently in reference to the hairs of the mustache (yunḥī ʿalayhā… atāhā) is problematic; perhaps the poet is evoking an unstated plural (ashʿār).

617 “soon… yellow” (ʿan qarībin… ḥurṣī): i.e., soon the white hairs in his mustache will be colored black with ink or yellow with nicotine.

618 “A partner of his” (wa-sharīkun lahu): presumably “Farshakh” (see the opening line of the poem); this and the following lines appear to picture the author’s partner calculating the pair’s winnings and losses.

619 “the game” (al-dast): or, punningly, “the gathering place, the divan.”

620 “spitters” (bassāqīna): the reference is unclear.

621 “cloven hoofs” (dhāt ẓilf): Jewish dietary law permits the eating of animals that have cloven hoofs (and chew the cud).

622 “No great critic… my room” (mā ʿābahā jihbidhun… ghurfatī): meaning perhaps that the occurrence of the game anywhere but inside his room would be considered by the critics so unlikely as to constitute a challenge to the readers’ credulity and hence a literary flaw.

623 “Its shape” (shakluhā): i.e., the shape of the room.

624 “Room Poems” (al-Ghurfiyyāt): the name refers to the author’s habit of writing poems on the door of the room he rented while in Paris (see above 4.19.4).

625 Saturn (Zuḥal): associated elsewhere by the author with bad luck (Volume Two, 2.9.5).

626 “repose… quiescent… cunt” (farajan… bi-sukūnin… al-farj): the author exploits the fact that faraj (“relief”) differs from farj (“vagina”) only by a single additional vowel and that sukūn means both “inactivity” and “quiescence (i.e., vowellessness)” of a consonant.

627 “Against the onslaught of grammar” (min ḍarbi Zaydin wa-ʿAmr): literally, “against the beatings of Zayd and ʿAmr,” the latter being generic names used in teaching the rules of grammar through exemplary sentences such as ḍaraba Zaydun ʿAmran (“Zayd beat ʿAmr”).

628 “People have fire without smoke” (li-l-nāsi nārun bi-lā dukhānī): perhaps meaning, “People (such as those who come and sponge off me) have matches but no tobacco,” i.e., expect me to supply the latter.

629 “chew the cud when I retire” (wa-abītu qārī): i.e., in the absence of a friend with matches, the poet is forced, at the end of the evening, to chew his tobacco.

630 “the lowest of the low” (bi-asfali sāfilīna): cf. Q Tīn 95:5 “then we cast him down as the lowest of the low.”

631 “of exalted standing” (rafīʿ al-darajāt): or, punningly, “elevated in terms of stairs.”

632 “distribute a predicate” (murāʿāt al-naẓīr): in rhetoric, applying to each member of a series a predication appropriate to it.

633 “my fire” (nārī): nār (“fire”) is feminine in gender.

634 “liar” (mayyān): here and often elsewhere in the author’s verse, references to lying and liars are to be taken in the context of his reference to “the lies of panegyric” above (4.20.44, second poem).

635 “This, the infection of your hand… has infected you not” (fa-hādhihi ʿadwā kaffikum… muṭlaqan): perhaps meaning that though the door is sick of being opened by visitors, the visitors have never grown sick of opening it.

636 “what’s been scratched through the wrinkled paint by the scraping of nails” (tanqīru aẓfārihi fī-naqri aẓfārī): the translation is tentative and depends on understanding the first aẓfār as meaning “the creased parts of a skin” (see Lane, Lexicon, s.v. ẓufr).

637 “thus saith the owl” (qālahu l-būmū): the owl is popularly considered a harbinger of bad luck.

638 “a peen” (al-shīqā): in the Arabic, “a mountaintop” or, punningly, “the head of a penis.”

639 “Sammū before entering my home” (sammū ʿalā manzilī qabla l-dukhūlī): i.e., “Invoke the name (sammū) of God (using some conventional formula),” as it is normal for a man not of the family to do before entering a house so as to warn its female inhabitants of his presence.

640 “Sammū… samm”: the author exploits the coincidental identicality of ductus of sammū (“invoke the name of God!”) (s-m-w) and summū (“poison!”) (s-m-m).

641 “I live in my room in a state of commotion” (anā sākinun fī ghurfatī mutaḥarrikun): or, punningly, “I am both ‘quiet’ (sākinun) in my room and ‘in motion’ (mutaḥarrikun)” with a further resonance of “I am a quiescent (i.e., vowelless) letter (sākinun) that is also voweled (mutaḥarrikun).”

642 “trying to screw it” (yuḥāwilu naḥtahā): naḥt means “to exhaust” as well as “to have intercourse with.”

643 “Except that beneath it run no rivers” (siwā an laysa tajrī taḥtahā l-anhārū): cf. the phrase tajrī taḥtahā l-anhārū (“beneath it run rivers”) much used in the Qurʾān to describe Paradise (e.g., Q Baqarah 2:25, 266, Āl ʿImrān 3:15, etc.).

644 “the very moons” (al-aqmārū): “moon” is a conventional trope for a beautiful person.

645 “Poems of Separation” (al-Firāqiyyāt): i.e., of separation from his wife and children when they left him in Paris and went to Istanbul.

646 “My past felicity had no like” (fa-māḍī naʿīmī lam yakun min muḍāriʿin lahu): or, punningly, “The perfect tense of my felicity had no imperfect,” i.e., “was destined not to last.”

647 “Why, what would it have harmed… to the end?” (wa-mādhā ʿalā… ṭūlahā): the author asks why the ill fortune of his earlier days should have been allowed to affect his later, happily married, life.

648 Hind… Mayyah… Daʿd: women’s names often used nonspecifically in poetry.

649 “The right-thinking man… the rightly guided” (al-rashīd… al-mahdī): or, punningly, the caliphs (Hārūn) al-Rashīd and Muḥammad al-Mahdī.

650 “do not see you in it” (wa-lastu arākumu/bi-hā): meant either literally (because the poet is in Paris while his family is in Istanbul) or in the sense that “I do not see you as worldly creatures.”

651 al-ʿĪnayn: a mountain at Uḥud near Mecca (site of a battle between the first Muslims and the idolaters of the city) from whose summit the devil is said to have proclaimed, falsely, that the Prophet Muḥammad had been killed (Qāmūs); presumably, it is the value of its association with the Prophet that makes it something to be cherished in the poet’s eyes, along with the assonance between this and the preceding and following words (al-ʿayn, al-ʿayn).

652 “You departed to be cured of what ailed you” (sāfartum li-l-barʾi mimmā nālakum): a reference to his wife’s illness and subsequent departure (see 4.18.15).

653 See 4.9.7: “for everything pulchritudinous reminds [a woman] of a handsome man” (wa-kullu ḥusnin innamā yudhakkiru bi-l-ḥasan).

654 “my twofold love for you” (ḥubbayka): perhaps meaning his love for the beloved both before separation and after it.

655 “when ‘leg is intertwined with leg… unto thy Lord that day shall be the driving’” (yawma taltaffu l-sāqu bi-l-sāq… ilā rabbika yawmaʾidhin al-masāq): i.e., the Day of Judgment (Q Qiyāmah 75:29–30; trans. Arberry, Koran, 620).

656 “Part One… Part Two” (al-juzʾ al-awwal… al-juzʾ al-thānī): according to the translator’s first reading of the text, this statement would indicate a humorously lopsided (709 pages in Part One versus 33 in Part Two in the 1855 edition) division of the work into two parts (see Volume One, xxxi — xxxii); it now seems more likely to him that “Part Two of the work will follow after the author has been stoned and crucified” should be understood to mean “once the critics have had their say.” That the author gave at least half-serious thought to writing a continuation of Leg over Leg is indicated by his earlier statement, “My friendship for you [the Fāriyāq] will not prevent me, should I examine your situation at some later time, from writing another book about you” (4.20.1).

657 The letter that follows is written in Egyptian dialect, an unusual choice at that date (for context, see Davies and Doss, al-ʿĀmmiyyah) and one for which the author gives no explanation; Michael Cooperson suggests that the author may have chosen colloquial to make the point that the addressees (“Shaykh Muḥammad” presumably excepted) were likely to be ignorant of literary Arabic.

658 “Sīdi” etc.: in keeping with the colloquial nature of the letter, titles (Sīdi, etc.) have been given in their colloquial forms; Sīdi means literally “My Master” and Sayyidna “Our Master,” while Ṣirna (“Our Sir”) is a humorous adaptation of “Sir” to Egyptian titling norms.

659 “Sīdi Shaykh Muḥammad, Sayyidna Metropolitan Buṭrus,” etc.: attempts have been made to identify at least some of these persons (see, e.g., al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, I:80); however, it seems more likely that they represent categories of person, i.e., the Muslim scholar (“Shaykh Muḥammad”), Christian clergymen (“Metropolitan Buṭrus,” etc.), and Europeans of various nationalities. For further examples of “Shaykh Muḥammad” used generically, see Volume Two (2.18.1n272) and 5.2.4 below, and for a similar roll call of European titles, see Volume Three, 3.12.25.

660 “my words aren’t addressed to / cattle, donkeys, lions, and tigers” (kalāmī mā hūsh ʿala l-baqar wi-l-ḥimīr wi-l-usūd wi-l-numūr): Rastegar suggests that “the animals… are perhaps a reference to the orientalists, religious scholars, colonial officials, and others with whom Shidyaq was compelled to work (and who, outside the small exilic Arab population, were the only possible audience for an Arabic text published in Europe)” (Rastegar, Literary Modernity, 118).

661 Long as this list of lists is, it is not complete. To cite but one example, the list of “despicable traits of the dissolute woman” in Volume Three, at 3.19.13, is succeeded in the same paragraph by a brief list of words for types of city streets, followed by another long list of words relating to sexual intercourse, which is itself followed by a brief list of words relating to inappropriate behavior by women; the last three are not listed here. In addition, the semantic range covered in the text is sometimes wider than that suggested by the particular word or words the author has chosen to represent it in this list.

662 “Doublets”: i.e., two-part exclamations such as marḥā marḥā (“Bravo! Bravo!”).

663 “thurtumī [?]”: the meaning of thurtum is “food or condiments left in the dish” (Qāmūs), in which sense it occurs a few lines before this list of vessels (Volume Two, 2.3.5).

664 “a place”: the Arabic text, quoting the Qāmūs, uses the abbreviation for (mawḍiʿ, “place, locality”).

665 “sukk”: discs made from an aromatic, musk-based substance called rāmik (see Volume Two, 2.16.25n252) that are strung on a string of hemp and left for a year and of which the Qāmūs says “the older they get, the better they smell.”

666 “maḥlab”: a kind of plum (Prunus mahaleb); presumably the stones are what are used.

667 “Alas for Zayd” (wayḥan li-Zayd): the passage cited contains a list of six words meaning “Alas!”; the words “for Zayd” seem to be added to situate the phrases within a spuriously scholastic context, “Zayd” being a name conventionally used in examples by teachers of grammar.

668 “makeup and face paint” (al-khumrah wa-l-ghumrah): the relationship between the two words as used here is ambiguous: the Qāmūs defines khumrah as above and defines ghumrah simply as “saffron,” which is one of the substances listed among those used as makeup in Volume Three, at 3.19.4; to the Lisān, khumrah is a variant of (lughatun fī-) ghumrah.

669 “Things peculiar to women” (ashyāʾun khāṣṣatun bi-l-nisāʾ): in fact, the text refers only to the women of Paris.

670 “Arabic languages” (al-lughāt al-ʿarabiyyah): meaning, perhaps, Arabic in all its literary and dialectal varieties; note the discussion of diversity in Arabic at 5.3.7.

671 In his Grammaire Persane, ou, Principes de l’Iranien Moderne (Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, 1852), Chodźko writes, “L’Europe est depuis longtemps en possession de tout ce qui est nécessaire pour l’étude des langues orientales; elle a des bibliothèques, des écoles et des savants parfaitement en état de les diriger: aussi, sous le rapport de la philologie, de la philosophie et de l’histoire des langues d’Asie, un ustad persan, un muéllim arabe ou un brahmane hindou auraient beaucoup à apprendre de nos professeurs” (p.i).

672 “the chapter on marvels” (faṣl ḥadanbadā): Volume Three, chapter 19.

673 “the letters” (al-rasāʾil): the Grammaire Persane contains a number of letters as exemplars of epistolary style.

674 Q Ṭā Hā 20:106.

675 “and he satisfies himself with the sands of the plain”: in the French (p. 201) Ils se contentent du sable des déserts [sic; the French uses the plural (“they satisfy themselves”)].

676 “Shaykh Muḥammad, Molla Ḥasan, or Üstad Saʿdī”: i.e., from an Arab, a Persian, or a Turkish scholar.

677 Abū l-Ṭayyib: i.e., Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī; see Glossary.

678 “my sandy shaykh” (ayyuhā l-shaykhu l-ramlī): see 5.3.2n383.

679 Lughat al-aṭyār wa-l-azhār (The Language of the Birds and the Flowers): the Sufi work Kashf al-asrār ʿan ḥikam al-ṭuyūr wa-l-azhār (The Uncovering of the Secrets Concerning the Wise Sayings of the Birds and the Flowers) by ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Aḥmad ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī (d. 678/1279) was published in Arabic in 1821 along with a translation by Joseph-Héliodore-Sagesse-Virtu Garcin de Tassy (1794–1878) under the French title Les oiseaux et les fleurs: allégories morales (Paris, Imprimerie Royale).

680 “the correspondence of a Jewish broker with an imbecilic merchant” (muḥāwarat simsār yahūdī wa-aḥmaq mina l-tujjār): the reference may be to Louis Jacques Bresnier’s Cours pratique et théorique de langue arabe… accompagné d’un traité du langage arabe usual et de ses divers dialectes en Algérie, Alger, Bastide, 1855 (second edition), which includes (pp. 465, 467) an example of Jewish Arabic in the form of a letter from a Jewish businessman to a cloth merchant. According to Bresnier (p. xi), “Nous publiâmes… en 1846 la première édition de cet ouvrage, que l’insuffisance des resources typographiques nous contraignait à autographier nous-même” and it may be that this was the edition that the author saw. However, the second, more formal, edition was published in Paris in the same year as al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq and by the same publisher (Benjamin Duprat) and he may have seen it then.

681 “the proverbs of Luqmān the Wise [in] the feeble language used in Algeria” (amthāl Luqmān al-ḥakīm [fī] al-kalām al-rakīk al-mutʿāraf fī l-Jazāʾir): in all likelihood, Fables de Lokman, adaptées à l’idiome arabe en usage dans la régence d’Alger; suivies du mot à mot et de la prononciation interlinéaire by J. H. Delaporte fils (“secrétaire interprète de l’intendance civile”), Algiers, Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1835 (see Chauvin, Bibliographie, III:16 [21]).

682 “silly sayings taken from the rabble in Egypt and the Levant” (aqwāl sakhīfah min raʿāʿ al-ʿāmmah fī Miṣr wa-l-Shām): if aqwāl (“sayings”) here is to be taken to mean “utterances,” a possible candidate would be Berggren, Guide français-arabe vulgaire des voyageurs et des francs en Syrie et en Égypte: avec carte physique et géographique de la Syrie et plan géométrique de Jérusalem ancien et moderne, comme supplément aux Voyages en Orient (Uppsala, 1844), which is a French-Arabic dictionary of the dialects in question with an appended grammar; if the author intended “proverbs,” the choice is less clear: many collections of Arabic proverbs were compiled by French writers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see Chauvin, Bibliographie, I) but none apparently cover both Egypt and the Levant. It may seem unlikely that the author would direct his criticism in this passage at a Swedish writer, albeit one writing in French, but Berggren was a corresponding member of the Société Asiatique (personal communication from Geoffrey Roper) and al-Shidyāq may have seen his book there.

683 “a book… on the speech of the people of Aleppo”: presumably Caussin de Perceval’s Grammaire arabe vulgaire (see 4.18.11n230).

684 “anjaq”: see further Volume Three, 3.15.5.

685 “the dialect of the people of Algeria” (lisān ahl al-jazāʾir): kān fī wāḥid il-dār ṭūbāt bi-z-zāf il-ṭūbāt kishāfū “In a house there were many rats (ṭubbāt, sing. ṭubbah). The rats, when they saw….” and kīnākul “When I eat” and rāhī “She is (now)…” and antīnā (= ntīna) “you (fem. sing.)” and antiyyā (= ntiyya) “ditto” and naqjam “I joke” and khammim bāsh “he thought he would…” and wāsīt shughl il-mahābil “I did something crazy”… and il-dajājah tirjaʿ tiwallid [= tūld] zūj ʿaẓmāt “the hen now lays two eggs.” Some of the preceding is open to more than one interpretation and the sectioning sometimes results in incomplete utterances; different Algerian regional dialects may also be represented. Though one might expect al-Shidyāq to have taken this material from Bresnier’s grammar (see 5.3.6n388), only some of the individual words occur there.

686 “(i.e., al-sādis, ‘the sixth’)”: an error for “the sixteenth.”

687 “they transcribe j… with… d and j”: the Arabic letter jīm is pronounced in literary usage like the j in Jack. As in French orthography j is not pronounced like this, but like the s in measure, traditional French transcription employs dj for jīm (e.g., Djerba) to avoid misrepresentation of that letter by French j.

688 “The preaching metropolitan’s ‘cut off azbābakum’”: see Volume Two (2.3.3, last sentence, Arabic), where the preacher (who is not, as here, identified as a metropolitan) says azbābakum (“your pricks”) for asbābakum (“your ties to this world”).

689 “this… sandman” (hādhā l-ramlī): see above 5.3.2n383.

690 “not everything white is a truffle” (mā kullu bayḍāʾa shaḥmah): i.e., “appearances can be deceptive” (see al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ, II:156).

691 “the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī”: Silvestre de Sacy’s edition was first published in 1822; the author critiques aspects of the second edition (1847) below (5.5).

692 “the travels of the scholar and writer Shaykh Muḥammad ibn al-Sayyid ʿUmar al-Tūnusī”: i.e., Tashḥīdh al-adhhān bi-sīrat bilād al-ʿArab wa-l-Sūdān (The Honing of Minds through an Account of the History of the Lands of the Arabs and the Blacks), published in a lithographic edition by Kaeplin in Paris in 1850 or 1851 and in a critical edition by Khalīl Maḥmūd ʿAsākir and Muṣṭafā Muḥammad Musʿad in 1965 (al-Tūnusī, Tashḥīdh).

693 Nicolas Perron and Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Tūnusī met when working at the veterinary school at Abū Zaʿbal, where Perron took lessons in Arabic from al-Tūnusī, and their association continued after Perron became director of the Abū Zaʿbal medical school and hospital. That the lithographic edition of al-Tūnusī’s work is in Perron’s handwriting is stated in the work’s colophon. However, the editors of the printed edition believe that the lithograph was based on the author’s manuscript and, given the lengthy list of errata at its end, must have been checked and approved by the author (al-Tūnusī, Tashḥīdh, 15–19).

694 “al-ʿaṣā with a y”: i.e., for , as though the root were ʿ-ṣ-y rather than ʿ-ṣ-w.

695 “aʿlā as an elative with an alif”: i.e., for .

696 “najā with a yāʾ”: i.e., for , as though the root were n-j-y rather than n-j-w.

697 I.e., when they should be written āminūna muṭmaʾinnūna.

698 “fallāḥīna Miṣr”: for fallāḥī Miṣr (“the peasants of Egypt,” iḍāfah).

699 maḥmūdīna l-sīrah: for maḥmūdī l-sīrah (“those of praiseworthy conduct,” iḍāfah).

700 “istawzara l-faqīha Mālik”: for istawzara l-faqīha Mālikan (“he appointed the jurisprudent Mālik as minister,” Mālik being in the accusative and triptote).

701 “lā yaʿṣā”: for lā yaʿṣī (“he does not disobey”).

702 I.e., for .

703 “ithnay ʿashara malik”: for ithnay ʿashara malikan.

704 “abādīmā wa-l-takaniyāwī mutaʿādilayni”: the error lies in writing mutaʿādilayni for mutaʿādilāni; al-takaniyāwī is the title of the holder of a certain office in the Darfur sultanate (al-Tūnusī, Tashḥīdh, 91 by the translator’s count: the pages are unnumbered); abādīmā was not identified.

705 “tajidu l-rijāla wa-l-nisāʾa ḥisān”: for tajidu l-rijāla wa-l-nisāʾa ḥisānan.

706 “daʿā lanā”: i.e., for .

707 “ʿujūbah”: i.e., for uʿjūbah.

708 “ṣawāḥibatuhā and ṣawāḥibātuhā”: the feminine endings —at (singular) and —āt (plural) cannot be added to a broken plural.

709 “lughatun fīhā ḥamās”: the phrase as it stands is not ungrammatical; perhaps the original (which was not found in the text) read lughatun fī ḥamās (“a dialectal variant of [the word] ḥamās”).

710 “innahumā mutaqāribayi l-maʿnā”: for innahumā mutaqāribā l-maʿnā.

711 “ḥattā taʾtiya arbābu l-māshiyati fa-yaqbiḍūn”: for ḥattā taʾtiya arbābu l-māshiyati fa-yaqbiḍū.

712 “fa-hal iḥdā minkum”: for fa-hal aḥadun minkum.

713 “yarfaʿūna aṣwātahum bi-dhālika ḥattā yadkhulūn”: for yarfaʿūna aṣwātahum bi-dhālika ḥattā yadkhulū.

714 “māshiyīn”: for māshīn.

715 “al-musammayayn”: for al-musammayn.

716 “ḥattā yashuqqūn”: for ḥattā yashhuqqū.

717 “munḥaniyūn”: for munḥanūn.

718 “innahum yakūnū”: for innahum yakūnūn.

719 “lā-ʿtāḍa”: for la-ʿtāḍa.

720 al-Tūnusī, Tashḥīdh, 11.

721 “al-Kuthub” (literally, “the sand dunes”): thus clearly in the original work, but perhaps an error for “al-Kushub,” the name of a mountain (Qāmūs).

722 Ṭāhā: a name given to the Prophet Muḥammad; the contracted spelling—Ṭh — explains the mistake made by de Perceval (see further down in 5.3.12).

723 “the Bright One” (al-Zarqāʾ): literally, “the Blue One,” meaning here both the city of that name (today in Jordan) and “wine” (because, according to the dictionaries, of its clearness).

724 “the yāʾ in hādhī is in place of the [second] hāʾ”: i.e., the poet used the form hādhī, a variant of hādhihi (see Wright, Grammar, I:268B).

725 “He also changed the [second] hāʾ…”: i.e., he generalized from the shaykh’s use of the variant, thus changing the scansion from a long syllable followed by two short syllables (hādhihi) to two long syllables (hādhī) and throwing off the meter (al-ramal).

726 “He also left al-Zarqāʾu uncorrected (Monsieur Perron having put a hamzah after the alif)”: i.e., though al-Zarqāʾ is so pronounced in prose, the meter here calls for omission of the hamzah for the sake of the meter, a subtlety the copyist failed to notice.

727 “Waṭʾ should properly be written without an alif”: i.e., should be written and not, as de Perceval presumably had it, .

728 See 5.3.3.

729 Derenbourg: not Darenbourg as in the Arabic.

730 The commentary was written by de Sacy based on the best-regarded Arabic commentaries. The verses analyzed here occur in both the primary text and the commentary.

731 Though Arabic words normally have been transcribed in this translation, the Arabic is retained here since a number of the items cited involve orthographic issues.

732 “” etc.: i.e., ʿawādhil, as a plural noun, cannot be preceded by a plural verb of which it is the subject; additionally, as ʿawādhil is the plural of a feminine noun, the words cannot be understood as an appositional phrase (“they said, the censurers”) which should rather be .

733 “[17]”: the two dots that appear here and frequently elsewhere in the second column of the original table (as well as the occasional blank) are assumed to be the equivalent of an ellipsis, marking references that the author had not recorded in full and was unable to supply later; the relevant line number is therefore supplied here in square brackets.

734 “with the force of a proverb” (makhraja l-amthāl): i.e., and therefore as a self-standing utterance unaffected by the phonetic context.

735 “ (ʾal-ṣayfa ḍayyaʿti l-laban): “in the summer you wasted the milk”—a proverb about an opportunity willfully wasted or a good foregone; the grammatical point is presumably that the first word is pronounced with an initial glottal stop for the same reason as that of the preceding example.

736 “the tanwīn… occurring as the rhyming syllable” (al-tanwīna… yaqaʿu qāfiyah): for the rule see Wright, Grammar, II:352B.

737 “with prolongation of the vowel for the rhyme” (bi-l-iṭlāq li-l-qāfiyah): for the rule see Wright, Grammar, II:352D Rem.a.

738 “ without tanwīn… ”: the main rule involved is that tanwīn (“nunation”) is never used in rhyme; additionally, the editors should have been alerted to the need to read rather than by the occurrence of as the last word of the first hemistich, which should rhyme with the last word of the second hemistich when the line is the first in a poem (Wright, Grammar, II:351 C).

739 The correct form is, of course, ilayhim rather than, as de Sacy etc. have it, ilayhum, which breaks a fundamental rule of the harmonization of the front vowel in this situation.

740 “how can tatayyum (“enslavement to love”) be attributed to ithr”: de Sacy’s reading (ithruhā) would require that the word be read as a noun (“mark, trace”), yielding “her mark is enslaved to love”; in fact it is here used as a preposition, thus “(my heart) is enslaved to love. After her….”

741 “How would you deal, my dear professors, with a ?” (wa-kayfa tafʿalūna yā asātīdhu bi-l-ghūl): a sarcastic jab, exploiting the rhymes makbūl, matbūl, and ghūl, the last meaning “ghoul”; the sense is thus something like “How would you deal, my dear professors, with something really scary (i.e. difficult)?”

742 “Kaʿb’s poem”: i.e., the ode by Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr (first/seventh century) in which he apologizes to the Prophet Muḥammad for having satirized Islam and which became “one of the most famous Arabic poems” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 1:421).

743 qaṣīdah musammaṭah: a poem in which the two hemistichs of each line rhyme but each line has a different rhyme.

744 “fettered” (muqayyadah): i.e., the rhyming syllables should all end in a vowelless consonant.

745 “The pausal form is required” (al-ṣawābu l-wuqūfu ʿalā l-hāʾ): i.e., .

746 “Strangely contorted” (hiya mina l-tabaltuʿi bi-makān): apparently meaning that the writing of the kasrah and the ḍammah is superfluous.

747 “unless the pronominal suffix refers to something mentioned earlier” (illā idhā kāna l-ḍamīru yarjiʿu ilā madhkūrin qablahu): the hemistich in question runs ʿadhīrī mina l-ayyāmi maddat ṣurūfuhu but it is more natural to read ṣurūfuhā (“days whose vicissitudes have passed”) than “my advocate (ʿadhīrī) whose vicissitudes have passed.”

748 “are fond of foolishness” (yuḥibbūna l-ʿabath): the author exploits the meaning of the mistakenly written ʿābith.

749 “Will you not then understand?” (a-fa-lā tashʿurūn): reminiscent of Qurʾan law tashʿurūn (“if only you could understand”) (Q Shuʿarāʾ 26:113) and similar phrases.

750 “Should be as the poet was not being wordy” (al-ūlā bi-l-ḍammi fa-inna l-shāʿira ghayru mutanaṭṭiʿ): i.e., the poet says “and my life…” and is not using the oath la-ʿumrī, which might be considered unnecessary and thus “wordy.”

751 : the author has misread de Sacy’s edition, which does in fact read .

752 “It would be better to stick with one or the other” (al-awlā l-iqtiṣāru ʿalā iḥdāhumā): de Sacy says in his commentary that durnā, with upright alif, is a noun of place (de Sacy, Maqāmāt, I:319 line 13), then quotes a verse in support of this in which he uses the same word with alif-in-the-form-of-yāʾ.

753 “Dhū l-Rummah was not one to use contorted language”: i.e., the meter requires a long syllable in this position, and the normally diptote form jalājila, ending in a short vowel, has to be read as triptote.

754 “a parallel form occurs in the first line” (wa-fī l-bayt al-awwal naẓar): the final word of the first hemistich of the first line of the probative verse quoted here is bi-qafratin, also with tanwīn, which should have alerted the editors.

755 “the word is twisted”: the reference is to the line above, where is an error for .

756 “line at the bottom of the page”: in fact, the line before the line at the bottom of the page.

757 “compare ”: according to some lexicographers, this word is invariable (see Lane, Lexicon).

758 “the diminutive not being allowed to take the definite article”: the words al-basīṭah and busayṭah (diminutive of the former) both mean “the earth” but the latter is always without the definite article, being treated as a proper name.

759 “unwieldy wording” (al-tanaṭṭuʿ): de Sacy’s version of the second hemistich of the verse runs wa-bi-nafsī rtafaʿtu lā bi-judūdī; more authoritative versions have the shorter fakhartu for irtafaʿtu.

760 “the first tāʾ being dropped to make it lighter” (ḥudhifat al-tāʾu l-ūlā li-l-takhfīf): on omission of ta- from the imperfect of Form V and VI verbs, see Wright, Grammar, I:65B.

761 “ is with a, you professors!” (al-ʿamā bi-l-fatḥ yā asātīdh): also, punningly, “Damn that a, you professors!” from the Lebanese colloquial expression il-ʿama (“Damn!”).

762 “also not ”: appears in the last line on p. 633.

763 “Corr.”: in the Arabic (ṣ) is used apparently as an abbreviation of (ṣawābuhu), meaning “the correct form being…”

764 “Qiṣṣat ʿAntar (The Story of ʿAntar)”: a popular romance relating a mythologized version of the life of the pre-Islamic poet ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād al-ʿAbsī; dating to the eleventh or twelth century AD, it employs a language with oral features and “drew the interest of nineteenth-century Orientalists, who saw ʿAntar as the paramount Bedouin hero” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, I:93). Caussin de Perceval’s Notice et extrait du roman d’Antar was published at the Imprimerie Royale in Paris in 1833.

765 Conte Alix Desgranges: not “Desgrange” as in the Arabic.

766 The only other translation of which I am aware is René Khawam’s into French (Faris Chidyaq, La jambe sur la jambe). This does not, however, pretend to be complete, since the translator asserts, without offering evidence, that much of the Arabic text was originally written separately and included in al-Sāq simply to take advantage of the availability of funds for publication; the translator has omitted this extraneous material and thus, according to his claim, presents the book, for the first time, “dans toute son originalité” (Chidyaq, Jambe, 19). Khawam does not specify exactly what he has omitted, but examples include the “Memorandum from the Writer of These Characters” in its entirety (Volume One, 1.19.11–23) and, more surprising in its selectivity, many but not all items of certain lexical lists (e.g., forty-three items omitted out of an original fifty-six between Shi‛b Bawwān (Volume Two, 2.14.42) and bint ṭabaq (Volume Two, 2.14.46) in the list of things incapable of preventing a man from shrieking “I want a woman!”; see Chidyaq, Jambe, 311). Khawam also omits the Appendix (Volume Four, 5.3.1 to 5.3.12). The result is a radical shortening of the text that appears to run counter to the author’s wishes as expressed in the warning in the Proem (also omitted by Khawam), “Beware, though, lest you add to it or / Think of using it in abbreviated form, / For no place in it is susceptible / To abbreviation, or to addition, to make it better.” (Volume One, 0.4.12.).

767 Starkey, “Fact,” 32.

768 Cachia, “Development,” 68.

769 On saj‛ in general, see Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia; for a discussion of saj‛ in al-Sāq ‛alā l-Sāq, see Jubran, “Function.”

770 This loss of “linking and correspondence”—by which I take the author to mean strict parallelism — would probably have particularly upset him: in a eulogy of saj‛ written later he writes, “And what shall teach thee what is saj‛? Well-matched words to which man cleaves by disposition and to whose sound his heart must yield in passionate submission, so that they become impressed upon his memory, and how effective that impression—especially when adorned with some of those beauties of the elaborate rhetorical style that employ orthographic and morphological guile…. This is the miracle with which no non-Arab can vie or to whose peaks draw nigh!” (al-Shidyāq, Sirr, 3–4).

771 Again, the author would not have been best pleased at the sacrifice of monorhyme: “As for the poetry of foreign languages, it consists of no more than farfetched figures and convoluted exaggerations and it is impossible to write a whole poem in them with a single rhyme throughout. You find them varying the rhyme and introducing little-used and uncouth words; and despite that, because of their inability to follow this system [of monorhyme], they say that a poem with only one rhyme is to be regarded as ugly. What hideous words and what appalling ignorance!” (al-Shidyāq, Sirr, 4).

772 Peled, “Enumerative,” 129.

773 Zakharia, “Aḥmad,” 510.

774 Peled, “Enumerative,” 139.

775 The author appears to have developed the preferred format for the presentation of such lists in stages. Thus, at the occurrence of the first such list (104 words related to augury and superstition, Volume One, 1.16.7), he first provides the list of words without definitions, then some lines later repeats all but fifteen items (those omitted being presumably the most familiar and thus the least in need of definition) in the form of a table, with headwords in one column and definitions in another (Volume One, 1.16.9), in effect rendering the first list redundant; to avoid reproducing two identical lists in the translation, the first iteration is reproduced there in transcription, resulting in the spectacle, possibly bizarre in a translation, of a block of text consisting entirely of Arabic. Thereafter the two-column table format prevails. Further, this first tabular list is not integrated syntactically into the narrative while most of those that follow are (exceptions include the “five work groups,” Volume Two, 2.16.8–63). The alphabetical principle applied to the tables also varies, with some arranged by first letter (e.g., Volume One, 1.16.9–18) and others by last letter (e.g., Volume Two, 2.1.11–16), with occasional anomalies. Even after arriving at the two-column table format, the author continues to ring changes on it. Thus, after a short table of words and definitions relating to attractiveness of the face (Volume Two, 2.4.6), he switches to a non-tabular format (Volume Two, 2.4.7 to 2.4.12), which allows him to group together words with the same root or that are metatheses of one another, while continuing to provide definitions, e.g., “and her ladīds have a ladūd (the ladīds are ‘the sides of the neck below the ears’ and the ladūd is ‘a pain that affects the mouth and throat’)” (Volume Two, 2.4.11). Later, he interrupts tables with “notes” (see, e.g., Volume Two, 2.14.13), a technique that allows him to enrich the lexical mix by introducing antonyms to the words in the tables.

776 The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, of which I became aware, unfortunately, only very late in the translation process, was also used to a limited degree. It has the benefit of offering a selection of words many of which are as rare and recondite as those in al-Sāq and might provide the best starting point for any future renditions of these lists.

777 Rastegar, “On Nothing,” 108. On the relationship between title and contents, the author himself says, “Every one of these chapters, I declare, has a title that points to its contents as unambiguously as smoke does to fire; anyone who knows what the title is knows what the whole chapter is about” (Volume One, 1.17.3.). Though the author may be teasing the reader a little here, the majority of titles do in fact reflect the topic dealth with (“The Priest’s Tale,” Volume One, 1.15; “A Description of Cairo,” Volume Two, 2.5, 2.7; etc.), while others either allude to the governing concept of the chapter (e.g., “Raising a Storm,” Volume One, 1.1) or — and this is especially true when the chapter ranges over a variety of topics — consist of or contain a word that is to be found within the chapter (e.g., “Snow,” Volume One, 1.17, or “Throne” in “A Throne to Gain Which Man Must Make Moan,” Volume Two, 2.4) in a manner reminiscent of the names of certain sūrahs of the Qurʾān.

778 Relying largely on Geoffrey Roper, “Fāris al-Shidyāq as Translator and Editor,” in A Life in Praise of Words: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and the Nineteenth Century, edited by Nadia al-Baghdadi, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Barbara Winkler. Wiesbaden: Reichert (Litkon 37) (forthcoming; details are provisional) and personal communications.

779 Muḥammad al-Hādi al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq 1801–1887: ḥayātuhu wa-āthāruhu wa-ārā’uhu fī l-nahḍah al-ʿarabiyyah al-ḥadīthah. 2 vols. Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1989.

780 Simon Mercieca, “An Italian Connection? Malta, the Italian Risorgimento and Al-Shidyaq’s Political Thought.” Unpublished paper.

781 The birth date 1805 or 1806 (rather than, as in many sources, 1801 or 1804) is based on a declaration in the author’s hand dated 6 August 1851 accompanying his application for British nationality in which he gives his age as 45 (National Archives, Kew, ref. H01/41/1278A) (Roper, personal communication). The plausibility of this date is reinforced by the statement of a visitor to Malta in 1828, who met “Pharez… a most interesting youth, about 22 years of age” (Woodruff, Journal, 47).

782 Roper, “Translator,” 5.

783 Roper, “Translator,” 5.

784 Roper, “Translator,” 5.

785 Roper, personal communication.

786 Roper, “Translator,” 5, 8.

787 Mercieca, “Italian Connection,” 13.

788 Roper, “Translator,” 7.

789 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 91.

790 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 92.

791 Egypt did not finally withdraw from Lebanon until February 1841. If al-Maṭwī is correct in believing that al-Shidyāq returned to Malta in October 1840 (for the start of the academic year at the University of Malta) (al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 92), the author’s words fa-sārat al-ʿasākir mina l-bilād (“and the soldiers left the country”) (3.14.5) would have to be understood as meaning that they withdrew from Mount Lebanon to the coast. Al-Maṭwī’s timetable would also require the author to have left Qraye after 10 October (the date of the defeat of the Egyptian fleet), traveled to Damascus, stayed there long enough to recover from his accident, go on to Jaffa, and return to Malta all in twenty days, which, while not perhaps impossible, seems unlikely.

792 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 125.

793 Roper, personal communication.

794 Roper, “Translator,” 8.

795 Roper, “Translator,” 8.

796 The author wrote at least twice to the joint committee of the SPCK and CMS complaining of his treatment; the letter referred to in the text is probably that send by al-Shidyāq in March 1844 (Roper, “Translator,” 8), which resulted in his eventual reinstatement (idem 9).

797 Roper, personal communication.

798 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 103

799 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 103.

800 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 126.

801 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 105.

802 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 109.

803 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 110.

804 al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 137–38.