Leg over Leg: Volumes Three and Four

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

This is the first translation into English of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq,⁷⁶⁶ a work published in Arabic in 1855 and celebrated thereafter both for its importance to the history of Arabic literature and as a “difficult” text. The book’s literary and historical significance is the subject of the Foreword (Volume One, ix — xxx). This Afterword deals only with translational issues.

The first element of the work’s title is itself often cited as representative of the book’s difficulties. The words al-sāq ʿalā l-sāq are ambiguous and clearly meant to be so. The common meaning of sāq is “shank” and thus by metonymy the leg as a whole; less well-known are the senses “male turtle dove” and “trunk (of a tree).” What it means for a leg to be “over” or “upon” (ʿalā) another leg is for the reader to decide. Paul Starkey reminds us that Henri Pérès proposed that the phrase should be understood as “[sitting] cross-legged” and thus evokes “the familiar attitude adopted by a storyteller who, comfortably installed in an armchair, is about to narrate a long story of wonderful adventures.”⁷⁶⁷ This bland interpretation cannot be entirely excluded, if only on principle: if the title is intended to be ambiguous, more than one possible interpretation is, by definition, required. Pérès’s definition is not, however, explicitly reflected in the text; rather, as Starkey also points out, the phrase al-sāq ʿalā l-sāq occurs there with sexual innuendo, as when the author writes of a woman’s suitor speaking to her of “the bed, of drawing her close, of embracing, of leg over leg, of kissing, of kissing tongue to tongue, of intercourse, and the like” (Volume Three, 3.4.1); similar is the earlier use, during a discussion that exploits the sexual suggestiveness of Arabic grammatical terminology (Volume One, 1.11.9), of the phrase alladhī yarfaʿu l-sāq (“the one who raises his leg”). In this translation, therefore, the title has been tilted towards the erotic by the use of the perhaps more suggestive “over” in preference to “upon.”

The second element of the English title—“or the Turtle in the Tree”—which builds on the two less common senses of sāq, has been introduced to provide a rhyme (an essential element of the title, though achieved differently in the original) and to sensitize the English reader to the ludic nature of the text as a whole.

Turning to the text, it should perhaps be made clear that al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq, despite its reputation, is not always “difficult.” As Pierre Cachia has written, the author is capable of expressing himself “with a simplicity and directness that a writer a century later would be pleased to claim for himself.”⁷⁶⁸ At the same time, however, his writing is characterized by two general features and two specific practices of prose organization that do pose challenges for the translator.

The two general features are a fondness for arcane vocabulary and a verbal playfulness that expresses itself through punning, word games, and humorous allusion. Both are so widely distributed throughout the text as to be numbered among its most fundamental characteristics.

To “give prominence to the oddities of the language, including its rare words” (Volume One, 0.2.1.) is the author’s first stated goal for the work. Rare words are present in huge numbers either in the form of lists, which sometimes proclaim their presence with headings such as “Here are the meanings of the rare words mentioned above” (Volume One, 1.16.9) or “An Explanation of the Obscure Words in the Preceding Maqāmah and Their Meanings” (Volume Two, 2.14), or else embedded in the general narrative. In the latter case, the author will, on occasion, call attention to the lists by glossing them in the margin (see, e.g., the note on izāʾ at 1.4.2 in Volume One). The main challenge posed by such words is the time needed to research them; I must, therefore, acknowledge the help provided by online dictionary sites, without which this translation would have been too time-consuming to be feasible. The sites I used most were www.baheth.info (for, among others, al-Fīrūzābādī’s al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ and Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab) and both www.tyndalearchive.com and http://www.perseus.tufts.edu for Lane’s Lexicon. Rare words pose a major obstacle to the translator, however, only when they fail to appear, in an appropriate sense, in any dictionary; fortunately, the number of such items is small.

Puns and allusions pose a greater challenge, partly because they may go unnoticed and partly because, even when they are recognized, native readers themselves may differ as to their meaning. Inevitably, therefore, interpretation sometimes remains speculative. The reference to “the two ks” (Volume One, 1.16.5 and note 235 there) is a case in point: two widely differing understandings of the phrase were put forward by two scholars I consulted; my own, third, interpretation may or may not be correct.

The prose organization practice perhaps most likely to give the translator pause in this work is the use of sajʿ (rhymed, rhythmic prose that often involves semantic or syntactic parallelism and that is typically associated with heightened drama or emotion in the text).⁷⁶⁹ In al-Sāq, sajʿ is employed throughout, both over the span of entire chapters and in passages within a chapter that range from a phrase or two to several pages. Patently, Arabic, with its productive morphological classes all of whose members possess, or end in, the same pattern of vowels and consonants, lends itself to this practice. It is enough, in Arabic, to choose as one’s rhyme word a Form III verbal noun of the pattern mufāʿalah, for example, to access hundreds more words of that pattern, or to deploy, say, the third person masculine plural imperfect verb to have at one’s disposal thousands of words ending in —ūna. The capacity of English to generate rhymes is more limited and the translator is therefore faced with a “rhyme deficit.” Not surprisingly, it has often been the practice of translators faced with sajʿ to ignore it, even though this be at the expense of a prominent aesthetic dimension of the original.

This is not an option, however, in the case of al-Sāq, if only because the author’s use of sajʿ is self-conscious and his references to the problems it creates numerous. Thus at one point the author remarks that “Rhymed prose is to the writer as a wooden leg to the walker” (Volume One, 1.10.1), following this observation with a disquisition on the dangers of its overuse and the differences between it and verse (which he claims to be less demanding). Likewise, the difficulty of writing maqāmahs, a genre to which sajʿ is intrinsic, is a favorite topic of the author’s (e.g., Volume One, 1.14.1). Even his tendency, when subjected to the appropriate stimulus, to break into sajʿ in the midst of unrhymed prose may elicit an explicit comment from him on his own writing, as when he exclaims, “God be praised — the mere thought of women produces the urge to write in rhymed prose!” (Volume One, 1.16.2).

The translator is therefore obliged to do the best he can. Given the limitations of English, some latitude is essential. In additional to full rhyme, near rhyme, rime riche, alliteration, and assonance have all been used; occasionally, the order of the Arabic periods has been changed. Likewise, it has not always been possible in the English to rhyme the same words that are rhymed in the Arabic, which has meant a reduction in the “linking and correspondence” that the author regards as an intrinsic element of the technique (Volume One, 1.10.1).⁷⁷⁰ It has not always even been possible to produce the same number of rhyming words in any given passage: the number of rhymes in the translation is fewer than in the original. I hope, nevertheless, that at least something of the force and humor of al-Shidyāq’s sajʿ has been carried over.

What applies to sajʿ applies equally, of course, to verse, which in the Arabic of this period is entirely monorhymed. In this translation, shorter poems have mainly been rendered into rhymed couplets.⁷⁷¹ Most of the longer poems, such as the Proem (Volume One, 0.4) and the poems at the end of the work (Volume Four, 4.20) have been left unrhymed.

The other challenging fundamental practice in al-Sāq is the presentation of large numbers of words, usually rare, in the form of lists. Studies have stressed the “sound effect of the accumulated words”⁷⁷² and the “fonction incantatoire”⁷⁷³ of such lists, and to these aspects may be added the distancing effect (amounting, in Peled’s view, to a “sense of terror”)⁷⁷⁴ created by the obscurity (i.e., the quality of their being unknown to and unknowable by the ordinary reader) of the words and, often, their phonetic exoticism. The impact of many of these lists is increased by their great length; one series of interlinked lists (Volume Two, 2.14.8–84) extends, in the original, over more than forty-two pages.

Such lists fall into two categories: those with definitions and those without. Each category calls for a different approach from the translator.

As a preliminary point of reference, the hitherto perhaps under-recognized fact that the words that constitute these lists are taken, largely and perhaps even exclusively, from al-Fīrūzābādī’s renowned fifteenth-century dictionary al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ should be noted. Similarly, the definitions given for these words, where definitions are given, are verbatim transcriptions of the definitions in the same dictionary and they are not of the author’s own making or drawn from any other source. Indeed, al-Shidyāq makes this explicit in the Proem when he says, “To me and to the author of the Qāmūs must go the credit / Since it is from his fathomless sea that my words have been scooped” (Volume One, 0.4.6) and again when he claims that the Qāmūs was “the only book in Arabic I had to refer to or depend on” (Volume One, 1.1.7) during the writing of al-Sāq; on occasion too he states explicitly that he is copying a particular list from the Qāmūs (Volume Two, 2.4.12). He also refers to the Qāmūs in the comments that he occasionally includes within the lists (see, e.g., the entry for ṭurmūth in Volume Two at 2.14.74 and for mumarjal in Volume Two at 2.16.47).

So thoroughgoing indeed is the author’s reliance on the Qāmūs that I am tempted to believe that my occasional failure to locate a definition in the Qāmūs is more likely to be due to the item’s occurring in some entry other than that in which it should, on the basis of root, be found, or to a discrepancy of editions, than to its not in fact occurring there. In the translation, verbatim quotes from the Qāmūs occurring in the lists have been placed in quotation marks, while material that could not be found there, and author’s comments, are given without quotation marks.

These facts have the important implication that these lists are lexicologically driven and bear only a tenuous and opportunistic relationship to reality. The list of headwear worn in Alexandria (Volume Two, 2.2.1), for example, tells us little about what men actually wore at that time and place; even the few items that may indeed have been present — e.g., “tall pointed hats (ṭarāṭīr) and tarbushes (ṭarābīsh)”—are included, I would argue, because they, like the other, more obscure, terms, occur in the Qāmūs, not because they were worn in Alexandria in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Similarly, a list of foods supposedly eaten in Alexandria (see Volume Two, 2.2.10) and consisting largely of edible vetches but containing few words for whose use in Egypt there is any evidence, tells us nothing about the diet of the inhabitants of that city at that time beyond, perhaps, the fact that it included a lot of pulses. Such lists are not intended to convey information about the world but to impress the reader — firstly, with the inexhaustible resources of the classical Arabic language and secondly, with the author’s mastery thereof; perhaps they also simply reflect the author’s fascination with words per se, irrespective of any intention to edify or impress.

The lists with definitions, most of which occur in the first half of the work and which can run to over forty pages, do not pose any particular methodological problem for the translator. They are, for the most part, presented by the author in the form of tables, with headwords in one column and definitions in the next.⁷⁷⁵ The headwords in these tables must be transcribed, the definitions translated; any other approach results in the nonsense of an English translation of an Arabic word followed by an English translation of its Arabic definition.

The lists without definitions form at least as large a part of the work as the tabular lists but pose a greater challenge. The work opens with one such list — eleven synonyms or near-synonyms for “Be quiet!” (Volume One, 1.1.1) — and they continue to occur throughout. They vary in length from half a dozen to close to three hundred words (e.g., the list of women’s ways of looking and walking in Volume Two at 2.2.4). Items in such lists are all synonyms, near-synonyms, or semantically associated words, and are often grouped into rhymed pairs, or series of pairs, which are sometimes also metatheses of each other. These lists pose three main problems: how to circumvent the limitations of English in terms of translational equivalents for the list items; how to deal with the under-specificity of some definitions in the Qāmūs (and other dictionaries), which further reduces the options available to the translator; and how to render their “incantatory,” recondite, and exotic aspects.

As far as availability of equivalents is concerned, shorter lists may not pose a problem: English may furnish a sufficient number of appropriate synonyms. Even medium-length lists may be susceptible to one-to-one, or near one-to-one, translation (see, e.g., the list of the sounds made by the organ in Volume One at 1.4.6), especially when the author’s use of onomatopoeia and other forms of playfulness opens the door for a degree of inventiveness in the English (see e.g., the list of types of metaphor and their fanciful subdivisions in Volume One at 1.11.5). In the case of longer lists, however, English may refuse to yield enough words within a given semantic field, while what words it does possess in that field may fail to match, even approximately, the Arabic items.

A case in point is the list of words describing women’s ways of looking and moving referred to above (Volume Two, 2.2.4). It is doubtful that English possesses 288 words in this semantic field and a virtual certainty that what words it does possess will not map exactly onto the words in the text. Further examples are the list of 255 words denoting genitalia and sexual activities occurring near the beginning of the book (Volume One, 1.1.6) and the 65-word list of activities associated with gambling and risk-taking (Volume One, 1.16.5); numerous others could be adduced. In such cases, the translator is faced with a choice between presenting the “untranslatable” words in transcription — in other words, not translating them — and resorting to multi-word glosses (e.g., “her stepping out manfully and her walking proudly in her clothes, her swaggering and her swinging along, her stepping like a pouting pigeon and her rolling gait,” etc.). The transcriptional approach would yield nonsense (a “translation” consisting of words in the original language); the use of multi-word glosses, while preferable, would nevertheless threaten one of these lists’ most important characteristics, namely their obscurity. Sonority may perhaps be retained through the use of rhyme, alliteration, and so on in the English, but the resources are, again, more limited.

In some cases, the problem is compounded by the under-specificity of definitions in the Qāmūs. For example, several of the different kinds of headwear worn in Alexandria (Volume Two, 2.2.1) referred to above are defined in the Qāmūs either by the single word ʿimāmah (any cloth worn around the head, or “turban”) or by the single word qalansuwah (any shaped covering for the head, or “cap”). With nothing but these generic definitions to go on, the translator is faced with the possibility of renditions along the lines of “in [Alexandria] you see some people whose heads are covered with… turbans… some with [other kinds of] turbans… some with [further kinds of] turbans… and others with [even more kinds of] turbans,” etc. The solution in this case, inadequate though it may be, was to associate the Arabic word with the appropriate generic English term: “in [Alexandria] you see some people whose heads are covered with maqāʿiṭ turbans… some with aṣnāʿ turbans… some with madāmīj turbans… some with the turban under the name mishmadh and others with the turban under the name mishwadh,” etc.

Such phrasal glosses and/or the use of generic terminology, while perhaps justifiable in terms of highlighting the lexically driven nature of these lists, may also produce a numbing repetitiveness or a kind of off-list intrusiveness—“turbans… turbans… turbans…” or “some other way of simply walking, the same with a difference of one letter… and another way of simply walking with yet another letter changed” or “the vulva said four other ways”—that is very different in impact from the original list.

The translator’s strategies for such lists have developed during the course of the work.

In Volumes One and Two, lists without definitions were mainly dealt with by “direct” translation (i.e., by using one-word equivalents conveying, in principle, the exact meaning of the Arabic word, such as “her strutting, her galloping”). When such equivalents proved impossible to find (as was often the case), I resorted to phrases (“her walking with her thighs far apart kicking up her feet”). Such phrasal equivalents, however, while perhaps accurately conveying the meaning of the word, betray the nature of the original text by making the translation wordier.

Starting in Volume Two, therefore, with this in mind, I also used some indirect strategies. For example, the list of forty-eight monosyllabic rhyming words (al-azz wa-l-baḥz wa-l-bakhz etc.) denoting a blow resulting in implicit or explicit injury (Volume Two, 2.1.23) reproduces all the monosyllabic words in the same semantic field found in Roget’s Thesaurus, without regard for one-to-one correspondence between the Arabic and the English; the result is closer to my mind to the effect of the Arabic than a translation that sacrifices percussive sound in a search for semantically accurate correspondence. Similarly, the series of notes relating to ugliness in women (which are themselves lists) that interrupt the tabular lists on women’s charms (Volume Two, 2.14.12–29) were translated using various tools: the first (2.14.13) uses mainly medical, or pseudo-medical, terms gleaned from the Internet (“nanoid, endomorphic, adipose,” etc.); the second (2.14.18: “dirty crockadillapigs, shorties, runts,” etc.) was compiled from http://onlineslangdictionary.com/thesaurus; the third (2.14.26: “women who have dilated dugs or deflated bellies, who are blubber-lipped,” etc.) depends on Roget’s Thesaurus and other nonspecialized lexical lists; and the fourth (2.14.29: “brevo-turpicular, magno-pinguicular, vasto-oricular,” etc.) uses Google’s Latin translation facility to create nonexistent terms imitative of the orotund Arabic. Again, the goal of such translations is to escape one-to-one equivalence in favor of similarity of effect.

In Volumes Three and Four, a thesaurus-based method of translating all lists too long or too generic to allow for one-to-one lexical equivalence was applied systematically. Each of the items in the given list was looked up in the Qāmūs and the definitions found there were assembled into a working list; the definitions were then grouped by semantic subfield based on the critical term used in the definition in the Qāmūs. A list of words relating to insincerity, for example, might contain twenty-four items, a number of which are defined in terms of glibness,⁷⁷⁶ a number in terms of fickleness, and others in terms of hypocrisy. “Glibness,” etc. were then looked up in Roget’s Thesaurus and their synonyms organized into a new list, attention being given where possible to reproduction of nonlexical elements such as rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm as well as rarity or reconditeness. The resulting English list is thus a representation and not a translation of the original Arabic list. Since this approach violates the reader’s presumed expectations of translation as a system of (more or less) one-to-one equivalency, I give notice of such “representations” in the endnotes, in a spirit of transparency.

Theoretically, this method of “representation” rather than “translation” could be extended further. If, for example, the works of Rabelais — another list maker and lover of recondite words — or of Thomas Burton, or of any other writer with a sensibility similar to al-Shidyāq’s, had been found to contain word lists resembling those in al-Sāq and if these were culturally plausible (i.e., did not produce distractingly European resonances), it might have been appropriate or even desirable to transfer these, lock, stock, and barrel, into the English text. In the event, no lists that matched the Arabic sufficiently closely were found.

Finally, a word on chapter titles. The use of fī (“on, concerning”) in the title of each chapter of al-Sāq has been said to embody an intentionally created “gap between the titular imperative… and its claim to an exposition of the subject that follows, and the narrative, that has nothing at all to do with the title.”,⁷⁷⁷ This insight, if accepted, would call for retention of “on” in the translated chapter titles. We have, however, decided not to apply this principle for two reasons. The first is that the use of “on” in English risks distorting the meaning of most chapter titles: to translate Fī nawādir mukhtalifah (Volume One, 1.3), for example, as “On Various Amusing Anecdotes” would be to imply that the chapter consisted of a discussion or study of such anecdotes, whereas in reality it consists of anecdotes tout court; the same applies to many other chapters, such as “The Priest’s Tale” (Volume One, 1.15), which is a tale told by a priest rather than a discussion of a tale, or “A Description of Cairo” (Volume Two, 2.5, 2.7), likewise. The second is that the use of fī to introduce chapter titles is a common feature of older works in the Arabic belles lettres tradition and not specific to al-Sāq. Thus one finds fī used in the title of every chapter of (by way of random example) the Thimār al-qulūb of al-Thaʿālibī (died 429/1038) and the Ḥalabat al-kumayt of al-Nawājī (died 859/1455). I have preferred, therefore, to regard fī as a conventional element of Arabic title headings requiring no equivalent in English.

Wahiduddin Khan’s translation of the Qurʾān is that mostly used in the text and endnotes, in accordance with series policy, but Arberry’s and Yusuf Ali’s translations were preferred in a few cases for a better fit with the context; all these were accessed via the Tanzil website (http://tanzil.net). The King James (Authorized) version is that used for translations from the Bible, in the version available at the University of Michigan’s site (http://quod.lib.umich.edu).

This translation is exploratory, an attempt to map the highly varied terrain of al-Shidyāq’s masterpiece and not only to reveal something of its many pleasing landscapes but also to mark where the figurative dragons are to be found. It may also be that the presence of the text side by side with the translation in the original bilingual edition and the awareness that some readers would be comparing the two word for word have made the translation more conservative (outside, at least, the realm of rhymed prose and the lists without definitions) than the translator would otherwise have preferred; this is especially true of the long poems. In any case, others may wish to suggest different strategies for addressing general problems, such as that of the lists without definitions, for filling in gaps with regard to historical detail (such as the real names of figures who are referred to in code), or for reinterpreting some of the author’s teasingly gnomic allusions. Others too may prove more talented at the conversion of rhymed prose and long monorhymed poems into English. I hope, nevertheless, that the appearance of al-Sāq in English will serve to alert a wider audience to its importance and its many rewards.

It remains for me to acknowledge the generous help of Mohammed Alwan, Ahmed Alwishah, Julia Bray, Phillippe Chevrant, Robert Dankoff, Hugh Davies, Madiha Doss, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture (IRCICA), Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Matthew Keegan, Jerôme Lentin, Joseph Lowry, Ussama Makdisi, Ulrich Marzolph, Simon Mercieca, James Montgomery, Mansur Mustarih, Everett Rowson, Ahmed Shawket, Adam Talib, Yassine Temlali, Shawkat Toorawa, Geert Jan van Gelder, Emmanuel Varlet, and, especially, Geoffrey Roper. Thanks are due too to the Project Committee and staff of the Library of Arabic Literature for their support and flexibility, and particularly to my Project Editor, Michael Cooperson, for his careful review of both text and translation and his numerous helpful comments and suggestions, to Chip Rossetti, Managing Editor, for his incisive direction, to Gemma Juan-Simó for her unfailing adminstrative support, and to Stuart Brown, the typesetter, for his skill and meticulousness in finding solutions to the multiple challenges posed by the layout. Above all, however, thanks are due to my Cairo-based colleague Ahmed Seddik for the many hours he spent with me discussing details of the text and offering always-plausible solutions to many of its knottier problems.