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Leg Over Leg
A?Mad Faris Al-Shidyaq
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Description for Leg Over Leg
Hardcover. This is the very first English translation of the work and reproduces the original edition, published under the author's supervision in 1855 Editor(s): Davies, Humphrey. Series: Library of Arabic Literature. Num Pages: 416 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: 2CSR; DSBF. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 240 x 162 x 30. Weight in Grams: 684.
Finalist for the 2016 National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators' Association
The life, birth, and early years of 'the Fariyaq'—the alter ego of the Arab intellectual Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq
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 ... Read morewide-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.
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Product Details
Publisher
New York University Press United States
Place of Publication
New York, United States
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About A?Mad Faris Al-Shidyaq
Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (Author) Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805 or 1806-1887) was a foundational figure in modern Arabic literature. Born to a prominent Maronite family in Lebanon, al-Shidyāq was a pioneering publisher, poet, essayist, lexicographer and translator. Known as ""the father of Arabic journalism,"" al-Shidyāq played a major role in reviving and modernizing the Arabic language. Humphrey ... Read moreDavies (Edited and Translated by) Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded by Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, as well as editions and translations of al-Tūnisī’s In Darfur and al-Sanhūrī’s Risible Rhymes from the same era. In addition, he has compiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitled Al-ʿāmmiyyah al-miṣriyyah al-maktūbah: mukhtārāt min 1400 ilā 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009) and co-authored, with Lesley Lababidi, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo. He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. He is affiliated with the American University in Cairo. Show Less
Reviews for Leg Over Leg
"...Leg over Leg by the Lebanese intellectual Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, [has] long been held to be untranslatable and so [is] appearing, in [its] entirety, in English for the first time."
Lydia Wilson
Times Literary Supplement
"Leg over Leg will eventually be acknowledged as one of the most important translations of the twenty-first century... Humphrey Davies's virtuosic work ... Read more(which he compared to climbing Mount Everest) gives English readers access at last to a quintessential novel of the era of Arabic literature's Nahda, or reawakening, and to one of the most profoundly humanist voices in literature."
Patricia Storace
Times Literary Supplement
"Humphrey Davies's translation, published in four dual-language volumes, is a triumph. He skillfully renders punning, rhyming prose without breaking the spell. Leg over Leg stands out for both its stylistic brazenness and the excellence of the translation. With this bilingual edition, the Library of Arabic Literature helps fill a large cultural gap and alters our view of Arabic literature and the formal trajectory of the novel outside the West. Any reader for whom the term 'world literature' is more than an empty platitude must read Humphrey Davies's translation."
John Yargo
Los Angeles Review of Books
"We're having a particularly good season for literary discoveries from the past, with recent publications of Volumes 1 and 2 of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's 'Leg over Leg' (1855)…"
Martin Riker
New York Times Book Review
"With this impressive edition and translation, Humphrey Davies has rendered one of the most challenging texts of Arabic literature, al-Shidyaq's al-Saq 'ala l-saq, accessible to a wide range of readers for the first time... The reader is plunged into al-Shidyaq's critical, humorous, uninhibited, sometimes bitter but profoundly humane, and utterly original masterpiece."
Hilary Kilpatrick
Journal of the American Oriental Society
"Al-Shidyaq, born in Lebanon in the early years of the nineteenth century, was a Zelig of the Arabic literary world, and his Leg over Leg is a bawdy, hilarious, epically word-obsessed, and unclassifiable book, which has never been translated into English before."
Sal Robinson
Moby Lives
"It is not too early to state that the publication of this work, in this edition, is a game-changer. This is a foundational work of modern Arabic literature and its publication in English is long overdue but given how it is presented here, it was perhaps worth the wait. This edition, with helpful endnotes, the original Arabic text, and in a translation that both reads well and appears to closely mirror the original, seems, in almost every way, ideal. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this is the most important literary publication of a translation into English, in terms of literary history and our understanding of it, in years."
The Complete Review
"Humphrey Davies's masterful translation makes accessible this unique and fascinating work, deserving of wider recognition and study... The translation adroitly and sympathetically captures the linguistic exuberance and literary inventiveness of the original."
Banipal Magazine
"The heroic achievement of award-winning translator Humphrey Davies marks the first ever English translation of this pivotal work... An accessible, informative, and highly entertaining read."
Banipal Magazine
"Its contemporaneity is astonishing... It would be doing Leg over Leg a massive disservice to not make it clear how funny it is. This is a book that for all its challenges, all its insight into humanity, all its place in history, had me regularly laughing out loud."
Music and Literature
"Part travelog, part anthropological observation and almost wholly satirical, Leg Over Leg observes and skewers the customs of all countries, though reserving most of its most sharp-edged scorn for clergy of various denominations, along with their political patrons... This immense work wasn’t written to shock, although it most certainly did, resulting in immediate bans and multiple subsequent abridgments."
Lydia Wilson
New Lines Magazine
"Humphrey Davies’ masterful translation of Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg over Leg is the English-language reader’s first introduction to the work of this foundational figure of Arabic letters. The protagonist leaves his native Lebanon to make a life for himself elsewhere as an itinerant scribe, poet, translator, editor, and author. This is a book about books, about conventions of writing, reading, bookmaking, cultural creation and crossings, bristling with puns and long digressions about the “oddities of language, including its rare words”—a preoccupation that makes Davies’ translation all the more remarkable as a work of literature and scholarship both."
American Literary Translators' Association
"The dazzling rendering by Humphrey Davies of Faris al-Shidyaq's tour de force, Leg over Leg, has unleashed this extraordinary memoir-fiction onto English readers."
Dame Marina Warner
author of Esmond & Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir
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