Description
Book SynopsisWitty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the coarse rural masses against the refined urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural typespeasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervishoffering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence.
Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes al
Trade Review
"Lucid and imaginative...the translation is thankfully reliable and delightfully readable...a remarkable achievement in many ways." -- Li Guo * Journal of the American Oriental Society *
"Paints a sharp portrait of Egyptian villagers. . . . This book has long had its passionate Egyptian adherents: both for its bawdy depictions of village life and for its language, which moves deftly between colloquial and 'high' classical expressions." * Middle East Eye *
