Leg over Leg: Volume One

by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, أحمد فارس الشدياق, Humphrey Davies (Translator)

Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures. Al-Shidyaq also celebrates the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language.

Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its "obscenity," and later editions were often abridged. This is the first English translation of the work and reproduces the original Arabic text, published under the author's supervision in 1855.

Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of Arabic literature from the Ottoman period to the present. Writers he has translated include Elias Khoury, Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa Al Aswany, Bahaa Taher, Mourid Barghouti, Muhammad Mustagab, Gamal al-Ghitani, Hamdy el-Gazzar, Khaled Al-Berry, and Ahmed Alaidy, as well as Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and Yusuf al-Shirbini for the Library of Arabic Literature. He has also authored, with Madiha Doss, an anthology of writings in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. He lives in Cairo.

Genres: Fiction, Middle East, Lebanon, Classics, Literature, Poetry

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1855

About the author

(Arabic: أحمد فارس الشدياق)

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq known also as Fares Chidiac, Faris Al Chidiac, Arabic: أحمد فارس الشدياق ‎) was a scholar, writer and journalist who grew up in present-day Lebanon. A Maronite Christian by birth, he later lived in major cities of the Arabic-speaking world, where he had his career. He converted to Protestantism during the nearly two decades that he lived and worked in Cairo, present-day Egypt, from 1825 to 1848. He also spent time on the island of Malta. Participating in an Arabic translation of the Bible in Great Britain that was published in 1857, Faris lived and worked there for 7 years, becoming a British citizen. He next moved to Paris, France for two years in the early 1850s, where he wrote and published some of his most important work.

Later in the 1850s Faris moved to Tunisia, where in 1860 he converted to Islam, taking the first name Ahmad. Moving to Istanbul later that year to work as a translator at the request of the Ottoman government, Faris also founded an Arabic-language newspaper. It was supported by the Ottomans, Egypt and Tunisia, publishing until the late 1880s.

Faris continued to promote Arabic language and culture, resisting the 19th-century "Turkization" pushed by the Ottomans based in present-day Turkey. Shidyaq is considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern Arabic literature; he wrote most of his fiction in his younger years.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is it you want from a novel? Genius that commands you to grovel? Technical mastery second to none? Or pun after pun after pun?

How about discussions of obsolete grammar? Or rhyming done without a st..st..stammer? The erotic may tickle your fancy, or lists of rude words from common to schmancy. Perhaps you like tales of fumbling fools, or stubbornly farting camels and mules. But all this in one book, it cannot be true (and is he really going to do this throughout the review?)

To you I say patience, and get hold of this quick, don’t stand around gormlessly clutching your d.... (or, to make sure I’m fair and equally blunt, those who have one can take their hands off their c....)

This hardback’s a beauty, and the publisher’s sacred and oft forgot duty to give us a book worth a lingering, loving and lecherous look, has been completely fulfilled. Any buyer should be suitably thrilled to flick through its pages (though the dent in his wages may be more than expected).

Though sadly neglected by non-arabic speakers, this publication should gladden you noble seekers of literature other than that in your mother tongue.

So buy it, try it, don’t deny it.

And last, but not least, as ignorance, hatred and fear have increased, reading something from demonized cultures helps keep at bay the carcass-fond vultures that grow in numbers when intelligence slumbers and the unknown-other is seen as an enemy, instead of a brother.

I won't go so far as to call it an obligation, but if you feel an inclination to give this a pass, then you can kiss my pale, sanctimonious ass.

[Jibran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I committed myself to writing a book that would be a repository for every idea that appealed to me, relevant or irrelevant, for it seemed to me that what was irrelevant to me might be relevant to someone else, and vice versa. If you're of a mind, submit - if not, so be it: this is no time for quibbling and quarreling.

If I can bring my organ in tune, I promise I will write a review soon!

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Round here, these parts, we intone God's name. Some, I'm sure, do it seriously and devoutly, telling Grandma they'll be coming over Sunday.....God willing. Others use Him just as an expression, on the order of 'you know', something like: By God, that's a big turnip. Others still, and your reviewer may fall into this large category, tend to the blasphemous or profane. Jesus: on a golf course. Sweet Jesus: in the right bar. Jaysus: sympathetically, on a Southern golf course or at a Southern bar. Jesus H. Christ: in a pretentious display of literacy. Back when I was employed, I would intone the deity in a public speech: God help us all. Sometimes I was more subtle, but you get the remorselessness. Maybe I was inspired by J. Wilford Brimley:

Now we'll talk all day if you want to. But, come sundown, there's gonna be two things true that ain't true now. One is that the United States Department of Justice is goin' to know what in the good Christ - e'scuse me, Angie - is goin' on around here. And the other's I'm gonna have somebody's ass in muh briefcase. *

e'scuse me, Angie.

The point I'm maybe making, maybe not making, is that, round these parts, we intone God, but sometimes we mean it, sometimes we don't mean it, and sometimes we're being satirical, what they call it. But if you didn't know better, and just read the almost ubiquitous Godbabble, you might think we were all Godcrazy here.

Are they Godcrazy there? Maybe. Probably. Maybe. I don't know. I hope not, but I see evidence. I wish John Lennon was still alive. I hope it's splintered there, as it is here. Is that asking too much? Just that?

So I read this. I do not know what I read. It's Book One of Four, and maybe I will, just to learn if he remains cynical, whimsical, angry. But I thought of God-intonations, here, and there, when I read this:

This morning I took a laxative, may this find favor in God's eyes!

Hold that note.

My man gets angry late in this first volume**, about something that happened to his brother. He stopped joking. And I worry about this, as I consider pushing on.

I wish John Lennon was still alive.

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqBJ...

**Which is a shame for someone who could recognize "a conspiracy of cretins". How New Orleans.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

(***I added/expanded a section at the bottom about the translation***)

Praise be to God, Who each happy thought inspires, and to guide man to righteous acts conspires. To proceed: everything that I have set down in this book is determined by one of two concerns. The first of these is to give prominence to the oddities of the language, including its rare words.

Under the category of oddities fall Words that are similar in meaning and words that are similar in lexical association. Here I have included the most celebrated, important, and necessary items that need to be known, and in elegantly eloquent form, for, had they been set out in the style typical of our books on language, divorced from any context, the effect would have been wearisome. I have also taken care on some occasions to present them in alphabetical order and on others to arrange them in paragraphs of rhymed prose and morphologically parallel expressions.

Yes please.

The general description of Leg Over Leg (the publisher copy) is "Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of “the Fariyaq,” alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world" - okay, sure it does that, but in Tristam-Shandy-Esque fashion very little of the narrative (in the volume at least) are narratively dedicated to the life of the Fariyaq, instead much of the text is taken up with chapter long descriptions of overheard discussions, a history of the Catholic Church's interference in politics and sundry sins and transgressions, food talk, "amusing anecdotes", vulgar lists, appendices of "rare words", and many fourth wall breaching digressions about writing in general, writing Leg Over Leg specifically, the difficulty of what the author is writing (and why he should be praised), explication of writing techniques:

Rhymed prose is to the writer as a wooden leg to the walker. I must be careful therefore not to rest all my weight on it every time I go for a stroll down the highways of literary expression lest its vagaries end up cramping my style or it toss me into a pothole from which I cannot crawl. Indeed, it seems to me that the difficulties of rhymed prose are greater than those of poetry, for the requirements regarding linking and correspondence set for lines of verse are fewer than those for the periods of rhymed prose. In rhymed prose, the rhyme often leads the writer from his original path to a place he would never have wanted to reach had he not been subjected to its constraints. Here our aim is to weave our story in a way acceptable to every reader.

an actual fairly frequent reference to how the author is really testing the reader's patience, or apologizing for entire chapters after the fact, even going so far as to assure the reader that the author will do better in the next volume.

I must go on at some length in this chapter, just to test the reader’s endurance. If he gets to the end of it at one go Without his teeth smoking with rage, his knees knocking together from frustration and fury, the place between his eyes knitting in disgust and shame, or his jugulars swelling in Wrath and ire, I shall devote a separate chapter to his praise and count him among those readers “Who are steadfast.”

I will say, unlike Sterne, the narrative does progress here, and there is an actual autobiography buried in all the digression.

The Physical Book / Translation

The book itself, the writing, the technique, the enamored love of language and its infectious enthusiasm; all is exquisite. The volume itself is lovely, it is no-frills, and the side by side translation is lovely. I want to give some standout examples of - besides just being beautiful to look at - some of the small ways in which having the side-by-side text is useful from a lover-of-translation's perspective. So there's this passage:

The tambour is to the organ as the branch is to the tree or the thigh to the body, for the only sound that it makes is a strumming, While the organ produces strumming and humming, mumbling and rumbling, jangling and jingling, squeaking and creaking, chirping and cheeping, burbling and barking, clicking and clacking, gnashing and crashing, chinking and clinking, gurgling and gargling, purring, cooing, and bleating, thrumming and drumming, roaring and guffawing, glugging and gabbling, la-la-ing and lullabying, horses’ neighs and the roaring of Waves, blubbing of billy goats and cricking of cradles, cries of men at war, call of merlins and raven’s caw, old women moaning and heavy doors groaning, snores and stertors, huffing and soughing, water boiling and grief-stricken bawling, frogs rib biting and ears tinky-tinkling, bulls bellowing and gaming-house reprobates roaring, reverberations and crepitations, pots gently bubbling and chilly dogs whimpering, pulleys squeaking and crickets chirruping, milk flowing, chickens crowing, and cats mewing, not to mention caw-caw and hubble-bubble

So, as you can see, there is this lovely rhythm to the translation. Reading this I happened to look over at the source text and came across:



Now even though I can't read one damn word of this I can see the repetition in the original text to appreciate in some small way the technical skill of the author and of the translator - it's kind of like being back in some of my linguistics classes.

One more example, and, as this is a bit (okay, a lot) on the bawdy/obscene side, I'm going to dump it under the spoiler tag: Alright, so typically the book lays out like this:



Which looks pretty standard.

Well, in one of the sections where the author is showing off his accumulation of "rare words" the reader is treated to

[…]far that the glans emerges, and a vein in the penis; nor about extra hard erections, ordinary erections, pricks that commit fornication, women’s stuffing of their vaginas with rags so that their wombs won’t come out, women’s spreading their legs wide during coitus, a man’s practicing coitus with one woman and then another before ejaculating and a man’s practicing coition with one women and then another before ejaculating,” one slave-girl’s hearing the sounds made by her master when he’s with another slave-girl, and a little-used word for plain copulation, the spontaneous leaping of she-camels by he-camels, emaciation resulting from incessant intercourse, lusting for intercourse, sleep taken after intercourse, having intercourse with one’s slave girl by merely inserting and withdrawing because not wishing to ejaculate, withdrawing before ejaculation because not wanting children, thrusting it into her the whole way, ejaculating into the womb, people who fuck frequently, men with long genitalia, vaginas that excite, men intercourse with whom is sure to result in pregnancy, men who find it difficult to have intercourse with a woman, the hard man who keeps on fucking, the deflowering of pre-pubescent girls, sitting between a woman’s thighs in order to have intercourse with her, women’s emptying a man of all his seed, a noun meaning copulation from which no verb is formed,” something White that comes out of the vulva, the curing of the thing resembling a scrotal hernia that emerges from a vvoman’s vulva and makes intercourse impossible, having protuberant buttocks (of a woman), the nympha at the base of the clitoris, to push forth its penis (of a donkey), women voracious as lionesses, dashing water on one’s vagina, the external parts of the vulva, the thing resembling a scrotal hernia that emerges from a woman’s vulva and makes intercourse impossible, the protuberant part of the womb, and the flesh of the inner part of the vulva; nor about the vulva (especially when large), the vulva said four other ways, the flabby vagina, the vagina that dries the liquid from the surface ofthe penis, the gaping vagina, the tight vagina, and another name for the vagina, the large ugly vagina with long womb flaps, the large wet squeaky vagina, the women’s sexual parts in general, the “bulge,” the “sprayer,” the fleshy vagina, the bizarrely spelled,” the “shrunken,” the “gripper,” the “nock,” the woman sent mad by the cravings of her crevice, the woman’s “wide well,” and the vagina again in another exotic spelling, the large floppy one, and other “instruments of erection”; of about mentioning the backside, the posterior, “the thrower,”[…]

First, holy shit, that's amazing. But more importantly - and this gets right into why this book was long considered untranslatable - take a look at how this page is laid out:



Because, again, it's all about this celebration of "rare words" - so each phrase in the translation is the closest the translator can get to defining the single "rare word" that the author is bringing out of his bag of tricks. And the side-by-side just drives it home; not only what the author did but also what the translator did, and how they are both - in very different way - literary triumphs.

An excellent work, and a true literary gift to have it translated - after long being considered untranslatable - more than 150 years after initial publication. On to Volume Two!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Is it a novel?

The question is a reasonable one. And if you've read enough Moore, the answer's pretty easy. But I thought maybe 1001 Nights (etc) might count as something like a first arabic novel maybe.

"What Does It Matter If ‘Leg Over Leg’ Is the ‘First Arabic Novel’? "
http://arablit.org/2015/04/27/first-a...
[thanks to lit=saloon, http://www.complete-review.com/saloon... ]

Also, a paperback (less of those $$$) is on its way ::

"Al-Shidyaq’s Classic ‘Leg Over Leg’ for the Masses"
http://arablit.org/2015/04/11/leg-ove...

Preorder from the publisher (there's two volumes in the pb) ::
http://www.libraryofarabicliterature....
"Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later editions were often abridged. This is the first complete English translation of this groundbreaking work."

But so I'm a bit slow on the uptake. Hadn't quite understood that the Library of Arabic Literature was one of those MAJOR PUBLICATION undertakings, akin to Loeb and Murty. They've only just gotten underway with a handful of books ::
http://www.libraryofarabicliterature....


btw, this Leg Over Leg is like one of those MOST MAJOR PUBLICATION events of the decade. Probably. Certainly more important than that one six=thing from that one norwegian guy.

[Anima]

About the author
‘His final journey, in a life of traveling, was to Cairo in 1886, in order to confer with the press about its publication. A fellow author and literary biographer described his visit:
“ Old age had overtaken him, dimmed his eyes, and bent his back; but he had lost nothing of his keenness or intelligence. He was, until the last of his days, a pleasant conversationalist with graceful expressions, amiable—with a tendency towards profanity. “

Eloquent and profane until the last, al-Shidyāq died, shortly after his return from Egypt, in the village of Kadiköy, on September 20, 1887. Some biographers claim that he converted back to Maronite Catholicism on his deathbed, but his own final wishes seem to contradict this. Never one to settle such questions simply, he requested to be buried in a Christian cemetery near his family home in Hazmiyyah, Lebanon, in a grave marked not by a cross but by a crescent.’
...’Al-Shidyāq even goes so far as to reject explicitly the very notion of equivalence, in the form of synonymity, in its opening pages. He writes:
“ In addition, I have imposed on the reader the condition that he not skip any of the “synonymous” words in this book of mine, many though they be (for it may happen that, on a single road, a herd of fifty words, all with the same meaning, or with two meanings that are close, may pass him by). If he cannot commit to this, I cannot permit him to peruse it and will not offer him my congratulations if he does so. I have to admit that I cannot support the idea that all “synonyms” have the same meaning, or they would have called them “equi-nyms.” “...’
‘In Leg over Leg, written, as he claims, with so much interest in women and sympathy for them that one might believe his protagonist had been transformed into one, his interest in women’s equality is centered less on female education than on female emotional and sexual fulfillment. Through conversations with the protagonist’s wife, the Fāriyāqiyyah, al-Shidyāq decries sexual double standards, advocating for the right of women to choose their own husbands, to divorce, and to demand sexual pleasure (see Volume Three). These conversations reveal her as a witty social satirist in her own right, or, as al-Shidyāq writes in the preface, one who “argues with theorist and practitioner alike and provides excellent critiques of the political issues and conditions, mundane and spiritual, of the countries she has seen”...”

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leg Over Leg is a four volume set of autobiographical novels that were written by Arabic author Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq. You could think of them sort of like the My Struggle of 1800s Lebanon. Back in the day people apparently lost their shit over Al-Shidyaq’s chronicling of the explicit adventures of his alter-ego “Fariyaq,” specifically the way he shunned authority and used naughty language to describe people’s sexual bits. As a result the whole project wound up being highly censored and abridged each time it was republished over the ensuing years. Humphrey Davies’s solid translation of the text marks the first time Leg Over Leg has ever appeared in the English language and thankfully it’s totally Girls Gone Wild in its raw uncensored style.

Humphrey Davies’s translation (from Chapter 1 of Leg Over Leg: Volume One):

[...] the woman whose vulva squeaks when it’s entered, the woman with the dry little scrawny one, the woman with the emaciated one, the woman with the tiny vagina a man can’t get at, the woman who holds the man’s semen inside her womb, the woman who flashes her “thing” and her belly folds, the woman the clefts at the head of whose womb are narrow and who holds herself rigid on her side for the man, the woman whose vagina makes a sound when entered, the woman broad-buttocked as a donkey whose vulva also makes a sound, the one whose vagina makes another kind of sound, the woman who swoons during intercourse and the woman who faints during intercourse, the woman who menstruates from her anus, the woman with a wide vagina, the woman the meaty parts of whose vagina are tight, the woman whose vagina is wide open and the woman whose vagina is open wide, the woman whose vagina may be either small or capacious, the woman whose vagina and rectum have been torn so that they have become one, the broad-vagina-ed and debauched woman, the uncircumcised woman with torn vagina and rectum who is also incontinent, the women so much fucked that, like an overused she-ass, she’s developed a medical condition in her womb [...]

READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/hard-...

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

i haven't got far, but it doesn't seem likely to change. Basically: it's bonkers, it's a travelogue, it is pretty closely based on his life so expect lots of 'then i went to syria, then i sorted out horses, we passed the night at x where i was told the custom of the country is doing y' but with quite a lecherous mind. Every so often he gives lists of obscure vocabulary which are translated as prose, such as the list of types of vaginas in another review, so that's a list of words with definitions: the effect is probably better in english. On the one hand, it's great, it's gripping, it's completely different, it's definitely the book for someone completely bored of modern literature: on the other hand, it does require hard work of the reader. It is very short: it's printed in 2 languages in hardback on thick paper at great expense and is about 200 pages of novel. Worth paying for to support the project but not very long. I will update this review when i finally climb this mountain properly, but i feel the concentration on the sex words might put some people off and the suggestion it's a 'novel' is a bit misleading: it's a seminal work across boundaries, but it's not a novel in our sense.

[Yara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in Paris in 1855, al-Shidyaq’s Leg Over Leg is often called the first novel written in Arabic. It does not read at all like Little Dorrit, and certainly not like Madame Bovary - What else should we call a fiction with chapters of rhyming prose, countless dirty jokes and digressions, an elegy for a donkey, long lists of rare words for genitalia, perfumes, and games played by children, all hung on the frame of a travelogue to Egypt, Malta, England, and France?

Al-Shidyaq spends several pages listing euphemisms for “vagina,” taken from a medieval Arabic dictionary: “the sprayer,” “the gripper,” “the large floppy one,” etc. This is followed by lists for “penis” (“the falcon’s stand,” “the big spider,” “the little man”), the anus (“the toothless one,” “the catapult,” “the whistler”), and intercourse (“to stick the kohl-stick in her kohl pot”) - If this is not enough, he compares the work of al-Hajjaj to the obscene writings of Laurence Sterne and John Cleland, whom he considers even more licentious!

Elsewhere in the novel, he lists the names of dozens of idols worshiped by pre-Islamic tribes. It makes sense, in this light, to think of Leg Over Leg as the first novel in Arabic, whose later examples, from Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy to Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, often provide social criticism in fictional guise. And here readers of Dickens are back on familiar ground.

[Bo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this author. 10/10 prose

[Abdulaziz AlJuhany · Rating 5 out of 5]

«هذا وإني قد ألّفته وما عندي من الكتب العربية شيء أراجعه وأعتمد عليه غير القاموس»

[Stuart Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the good fortune to be paid to work on this and its companion volumes, and enjoyed every minute. An anarchic and Rabelaisian pseudo-autobiography, kind of Tristram Shandy meets Flann O’Brien. Beautifully (ahem) typeset, too.

[Lisalou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather Tristram Shandy like. Quite enjoyable.