Description
Book SynopsisWritten in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside.
The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poemsanother popular genre of the dayand presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-centu
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 *
