that’s Aboo Zeid of Sarooj, the school-men’s lamp, alone in the world!”
There warn’t nothing to do then but go back out the same way I come in. “Good land,” I said to myself, “I never seen nobody like that old blister for clean out-and-out cheek!”
Glossary
fews n’ two money or cash in small quantity
Jeff a pest or a bore
high-hat to put on airs with, act superior to
Notes
The wordplay in §1.1, which sets the tone for the whole collection, might be lexically translated as “when I took for a seat the withers (ghārib) of exile (ightirāb).” The Arabic words ghārib (the upper part of a horse’s back) and ightirāb (being far from home) share the same root letters but are otherwise unrelated. This sort of wordplay (called jinās) occurs in every Imposture. I have not tried to duplicate it in every instance. In this case, the expression “back of beyond” brings together some of the same meanings.
“Sana” (§1.1) is Sanaa (in Arabic, Ṣanʿāʾ), the principal city of Yemen. Here and elsewhere I have spelled placenames as I imagine my model text would have spelled them. Most of the Impostures begin by stating that the action took place in a particular city or town (See Map, p. xxviii), but nothing specific to that town is ever named or shown, with three exceptions (in Mecca, the pilgrimage; in Baghdad, the caliphal palace; and in Basra the riverbank and the mosque of the Ḥarām tribe). In his discussion of the “fictional landscape” of the Taḥkemoni, al-Ḥarīzī’s Hebrew Impostures, Michael Rand remarks that “the function of the geographical names . . . is not to chart a particular route, but rather to create a general sense of motion and restlessness” (Rand, Evolution, 18). The Imposture form, he goes on to say, is “suited for representing movement as such, not telic movement from a starting point to an end”:
[Coming] from a particular place and having a specific place to go would constrain Heman and Ḥever [the narrator and protagonist of al-Ḥarīzī’s Impostures] to the point that they could no longer play out their game of unexpected meetings and surprise-recognitions as they roam over a far-flung landscape that is tantalizingly real and familiar and at the same time elusive and fantastic (Rand, Evolution, 22).
Besides running into Abū Zayd almost everywhere he goes, al-Ḥārith, no matter how far-flung his destination, nearly always finds learned men discussing the fine points of the same linguistic and literary tradition. In that sense, nothing he sees anywhere in the “realm of Islam” really surprises him (Kilito, Séances, 21). It has also been argued that cities in the Impostures figure as spaces where the rule of law applies, as opposed to the wilderness, where Abū Zayd goes to escape justice (Bin Tyeer, “Literary Geography”; see further Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 181–82).
Date wine (nabīdh, §1.7), being an intoxicant, was often banned by Islamic jurists. Some, however, permitted drinking it before it was fully fermented. As for the disciple, Zakharia thinks he is Abū Zayd’s son, who appears in several of the episodes (Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 128). Apart from who he might be or what he might stand for, he is needed here to introduce Abū Zayd to al-Ḥārith.
The song in §1.8 is a pastiche of Cab Calloway’s song “Minnie the Moocher” (1931). As I realized to my surprise when I was halfway through the translation, the 1932 Betty Boop animated short of the same title puts the song into the mouth of a grouchy creature who lives in a cave. This coincidence did much to reassure me that making Abū Zayd sound like Cab Calloway was not as bizarre a choice as one might suppose.
“Sarooj” (§1.9) is Sarūj, now called Suruç, a town in southwestern Turkey near the border with Syria. Perhaps not coincidentally, given Abū Zayd’s fondness for wine, the town was known for its viniculture. Its real-life alternation between Christian and Muslim rule may have recommended it to al-Ḥarīrī, whose hero claims to have been exiled from there and returns there in the last Imposture. But there are other, better-known cities that changed hands too, and it remains unclear why al-Ḥarīrī chose it as his hero’s birthplace (Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 140). Al-Ḥarīrī had no known connection to the place, unless the report of his meeting a real-life refugee from Sarūj is true (Yāqūt, Muʿjam, 5:2203). Although Zakharia is right to point out the story should not be taken to mean that Abū Zayd was a real person (Zakharia, “Norme”), there is no reason why al-Ḥarīrī cannot have taken the name from that of a real-life refugee and mendicant. Equally, he may have chosen the name because it coincidentally shares three letters with the Arabic root s-r-j, making it usable for playing games with such words as sarj, saddle, and sirāj, lamp.
Bibliography
Bin Tyeer, Sarah R. “The Literary Geography of Meaning in the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī.” In The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head, 63–80. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Calloway, Cab. “Hepster’s Dictionary.” http://www.openculture.com/2015/01/cab-calloways-hepster-dictionary.html and http://www.dinosaurgardens.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/hepsters.html.
Calloway, Cab, and Irving Mills. “Minnie the Moocher.” Performed by Cab Calloway and his orchestra. Recorded March 3, 1931. Released by Brunswick BR 6074.
Fleischer, Dave, dir. Minnie the Moocher. Animated by Willard Bowsky and Ralph Sommerville. Released by Paramount Pictures, 1932.
Kilito, Abdelfattah. Les Séances: Récits et codes culturels chez Hamadhânî et Harîrî. Paris: Sindbad, 1983.
Marsh, John. “A Call to Reformation.” In Temperance Hymn Book and Minstrels, 15–16. New York: American Temperance Union, 1841.
. “Oh Touch It Not, For Deep Within.” In Temperance Hymn Book and Minstrels, 53. New York: American Temperance Union, 1841.
Rand, Michael. The Evolution of al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens). The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3200/pg3200-images.html.
Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī. Muʿjam al-udabāʾ. Edited by Iḥsān ʿAbbās. Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993.
