Leg over Leg: Volume Three

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

Leg over Legrecounts 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 inLeg Over Lega 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.

488 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2013

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

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gather your drift to be that such verbs are too many to count in our noble language and that most senses have numerous words, which scholars call, as you once told me, “assy-nonymous.”' ‘I didn’t say assy-nonymous,’ I responded. ‘I said “synonymous,” and I told you that this act alone has more than two hundred words pertaining to it, for every word that denotes pushing, pricking, pressing, or inserting denotes it too.” She said, ‘And can you cite me a single term that pertains to abstention from women, out of chastity and God-fearingness?’ I said, ‘No such term has come my way, or I would have memorized it, for I dote on every term that has to do with them. It seems the Arabs were unaware of any such thing, though tabattala and bakuma each denote it in one of their senses.’ ‘That counts for little,” she replied.

Yeah, assy-nonymous is a butt joke, based on a pun in the original Arabic.  It loses a bit in translation, but tip-of-the-hat to the translator for trying. This bit comes in the second half of the third volume, right after the Fāriyāq is interrupted by his wife while providing a list of words pertaining to intercourse.

I found the first half of this volume to be mostly flat, having some decent bits but overall being a fairly straightforward travel narrative. The back half of the volume more than makes up for it by being pretty equally poetic and obscene - there are frequently passages of elegant poetry intermingled with long passages dedicated to litanies of words pertaining to asses, busts, frolicking, fucking, and various disgusting (and hilarious) acts. And both parts - the poetic and the obscene - serve to lift the book well above its kind of lethargic first half.

And this man-mannered, ill-natured, shrewish, base, disobedient, worthless, shamelessly staring, irascible, wayward, two-timing, unblushing exhibitionistic, immodest, sharp-tongued, unneighborly, loudmouthed, wanton, whorish, chambering, nocturnally mobile, promiscuous, trampy, brassy brazen-faced, interfering, spoiled, ugly, languorous, loose, depraved, insatiable, predatory, lustful, estrous, philandering, incontinent, begging, in-heat, backside-presenting, rug-spotting, swollen vulvaed, termagant, vixenish, foulmouthed, lewd, obscene, bawdy, clamorous, nymphomaniacal, slave-chasing, lecherous, licentious, lascivious slut of a mistress of mine, while every male in town who sees her strutting through its markets, streets, alleys, lanes, and cul-de-sacs believes to be inviting him, with her eyes and her every limb, to look lively and apply himself to intercourse, to cock a leg, to snatch a kiss, to become erect, to copulate, to bed, to swive, to screw, to thrum, to wimble, to ejaculate (inside and outside), to have coitus (interruptus and non-), to meng, to frig, to frot, to hug, to mount, to hump, to pump, to jigger, to jagger, to jangle, on all fours, with on her back or on her front, with her legs splayed or closed, from the side or at an angle, during menstruation or not and with or without deep penetration, as well as to “wham-bam!” and “schlup-flup!” and “jiggy-jiggy!” and “hokey-pokey!,” sits in the chambers of the dame of gossips and never stops accusing her neighbors of looking out the window, laughing,[...]

I've got to say, “wham-bam!” and “schlup-flup!” and “jiggy-jiggy!" and “hokey-pokey!," is not even close to the sort of thing I ever expected to come across in a mid-19th century Arabic text. Bravo.

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great literature but with longeurs, has to be read