Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded: Volume One

Library of Arabic Literature

by Yusuf Al-Shirbini, Youssef Rakha (Foreword), Humphrey Davies (Translator)

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded pits the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbīnī describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervish—offering 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 Abū Shādūf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbīnī 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 also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbī. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era.An English-only edition.

Genres: History, Literature

367 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 9, 2019

About the author

Yusuf al-Shirbini was a well-educated Egyptian from the eleventh/seventeenth century, thought to originate from the town of Shirbin, then a significant rural center in the eastern part of Delta. Little is known about him--including his social standing and profession--beyond Brains Confounded and two other extant texts: The Pearls (Al-La'ali' wa-l-durar) and The Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls (Tarh al-madar li-hall al-la'ali' wa-l-durar).

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual mini-masterwork from the canon of bawdy, naughty, and perverted Arabic literature from the 18th century, featuring more pissing, shitting, romping, and violation of young boys than a hen night in Ancient Rome. The first volume contains a series of merciless excoriations of the peasantry, who were simpletons and morons worthy of contempt from the upper orders (forget about the satire “punching up” here), featuring anecdotal depictions of their escapades, their bumbling rustic ill-manners, their dervishes, their pastors, and most importantly, the slack nature of their poets’ scansion, which is comprehensively trounced as slipshod. These episodes are mostly hilarious, and slap-bang in the Rabelaisian tradition. The second volume allows me to wheel out the overused term that no one uses, “pre-postmodern”, containing a long and semi-spurious expounding of the titular ode, Pale Fire-like, although much funnier, including enough scatological nicknames and digressive tales to lead one through a section less readable for its puns and plays on Arabic grammar (a lot of which loses its chuckledom en route to the koine—translator Humphrey Davis’s efforts are to be applauded, for he wrings as much merriment as he can from the most pedantic parts). These two volumes are packed with violently meticulous endnotes, making these releases a triumph for the scholar and the new reader alike. [Note: NYU Press have also released Al-Sanhuri’s Risible Rhymes, an earlier work that performs similar poetic expounding with less amusing results].

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

If you liked Darconville's Cat, you'll like Brains Confounded.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī was a well-educated Egyptian from the eleventh/seventeenth century, thought to originate from the town of Shirbīn, then a significant rural center in the eastern part of Delta. (Publisher copy) [Egyptian dating is completely alien to me, and google was no help as to why the two very different centuries are cited - this is used through the lengthy introduction as well - and a casual round of internet searching didn’t really shed any light here. The western date of completion of the text was 1686, which is helpful in placing this work in context]

Despite its genesis occurring a number of centuries after, the closest comparison I can come up to for this work – at least for this here first volume - is bawdy medieval literature. Gargantua and Pantagruel is another helpful comparison. That said, this is quite a bit more tedious than top-shelf medieval stuff (and way more so than G&P), which is at least slightly odd as this has a much more frantic pacing than either, but is so rapid fire in its anecdotes and recitations that that the subject-changes quickly blend into a low level drone, especially as the presentation of the translation - the paragraph breaks specifically - doesn’t signal the change in subject in a manner commensurate with its western counterparts. Basically each fairly large section is just a running string of stories and anecdotes hating on poor/rural folks that never bother to pause for breath.

But dude the author hates poor folks so damn much. It’s fairly commendable the level of disdain and antipathy he manages to keep rapidly boiling throughout the text. He approaches this with a moral fervor - probably half of why it reminds me of medieval stuff - where he basically / emphatically equates the rural lives of poor people as being directly tied to their general unworthiness where their moral depravity is directly expressed through their coarse and filthy lives but where also their coarseness and filthy lives are proof of their moral depravity. Which has a nice unassailable logic to it.

And there’s lots and lots and lots of talk of shit. Fucking shows up a good deal as well, but al-Shirbīnī absolutely loves talking about shit so much that it manages to make its way into probably 80% of the anecdotes. It’s actually pretty impressive. (And is also the other half of why this reminds me so much of medieval stuff)

Then his sickness took a turn for the worse, and he got up and went to the lavatory, where he expired and whence he emerged a dead man. I was informed that the only grave they could find for him was beside a wall next to a ruined tomb, and that when they dug down they discovered a structure that on being opened turned out to be an old latrine, and that is where they buried him. Thus he lived as shit and died in shit. l composed the following on him:

God put paid to a heretic
Who to mankind was a blight;
He lived in vomit and foulness
And he died in shame and shite.

So, this is good but tedious, and the mean-spirited pedantry might certainly rub some readers the wrong way, but overall this is a solid entry into this imprint of books, which continues (continued? Verb tense gets a bit odd since this came out like four years ago and his been sitting on a shelf in my house for just as long) to be an exciting imprint of generally unknown (to me) works in translation from a literary tradition I need to keep exploring.

{I highly recommend picking up the hardback versions of these two volumes, because they include the lovely side-by-side translation and original text layout, but this *is* one of the works where the imprint has also provided a much less expensive paperback option if that helps}

**ratings are dumb - even though this doesn’t have the weight of some of the super old stuff I’ve logged on this site, I still feel it’s absurd to try and put a star rating on a work of translation of this significance; but ratings get eyeballs, and how else am I going to convince you to read this***

[Caroline]

Read one-third to one half. Seemed repetitive to go on; farther on I could see mostly philological emphasis. Interesting as a book you wouldn't expect (scatalogical erudition), and as an example of the art of using classic works to weave an argument or story as much for the display of erudition as the new product, it seemed from the introduction, which was quite useful.

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's finished it; is it worth requesting again via ILL to get to the end?

[Lulu]

Before 1686

Arabic v1 https://www.libraryofarabicliterature...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...