dirty crockadillapigs and three other ways of walking, each with a difference of one letter - Fāris al-Shidyāq's Leg over Leg, or the novelist as lexicographer

Some readers may remember – why they would, I do not know, but we live in an age of miracles – that a few months ago I jotted down some notes about the first volume (of four) of an Arabic novel written in 1855, Leg over Leg or The Turtle in the Tree concerning The Fāriyāq What Manner of Creature Might He Be by Fāris al-Shidyāq, “a Lebanese Maronite of great learning and greater smartassery.”  I am quoting myself, since I cannot improve on that.

I recommend going back to that post for its many links to excerpts, reviews, and an instructive interview with the translator, to use the inadequate ordinary designation, Humphrey Davies.

I have now read the second volume of the novel, which is a lot like the first, only moreso.  The protagonist leaves Lebanon for Egypt and Malta, allowing opportunities for extended mockery of Egyptians and “Franks” but even more for the deployment and elaboration of long lists of words, words with their definitions, words that are inventions, words that rhyme, words in lists.

(Note: women who are dirty crockadillapigs, shorties, runts, trolls, long-necked pinheads, midgets, wide-wooed woofers, waddlers, bitty-butted beasts, scrawnies, and spindle-legs are more coquettish than any of the above.) (207)

Leg over Leg is published with the Arabic, so here I could look longingly at the original wondering what on earth was actually in it.  The “above” including many dictionary-like pages of Arabic words describing kinds of women:

or a zahrā’,                         “a woman of radiant face”
or a masbūrah,                  a female “of comely form”

I mean, pages and pages like this, meaning that in places the 200 page book zipped right by as I gave the lists of definitions the concentration I could – very little, except when the lists turned to food (dalik, “a dish made of butter and milk, or of butter and dates, or a plant to which red rose hips may be admixed, in which case it becomes as sweet as moist fresh dates,” 265).  Otherwise, the clothes, perfumes, woods, fish, utensils, gems (“Chinese beads from Yemen,” “a kind of carnelian,” “a kind of seashell”) will have to wait for a student of Arabic.

All of this is part of what is strictly speaking a single sentence that is thirty pages long.  Someone should do an Arabic wordcount and add it to the appropriate “world’s longest” lists.

Early in the book I realized that what Davies was often doing was not so much translating as describing the Arabic text.  For example, at one point a couple of pages are given to a paragraph about how a woman moves, a list of verbs: “her staggering and swaying, her tottering and strutting, her bending and bowing.”  Davies is capturing the alliteration; who knows or cares exactly what substitutions he has made.  The verbs become more complicated:

her skelping and her stepping quick, her tripping quickly along with short steps and three other ways of walking, each with a difference of one letter, and her walking nicely, her limping and a fourth way of walking with yet another letter changed (43)

And, yes, there in the Arabic I can see what he means, word after word with one letter changed, all of which, Davies insists, are treated as exact synonyms in every dictionary, and whose fault is it that the Arabic vocabulary overwhelms and exhausts the English?

There is no novel in English like Leg over Leg.  Arabic! 1855!

“I read Leg over Leg and understood it all!” - what Arabic novels were like in 1855

This last book featured during Wuthering Expectations education week mostly educated me, and it mostly taught me that it exists.  The book the 1855 Arabic novel is Leg over Leg or The Turtle in the Tree concerning The Fāriyāq What Manner of Creature Might He Be, Vol. 1 (of four), by Fāris al-Shidyāq, a Lebanese Maronite of great learning and greater smartassery.  The novel is a digressive, parodic, smutty metafictional autobiography, some kind of relative of Tristram Shandy although with vocabulary lists and discussions of grammar, far more writing about words.

Thus, the sounds produced by an organ:

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, [skipping many more sounds], frogs ribbiting and ears tinky-tinkling, bulls bellowing and gaming-house reprobates roaring, reverberations and crepitations, pots gently bubbling and chilly dogs whimpering, [skip skip skip] not to mention caw-caw and hubble-bubble and wham-bam and slurp-slurp and baa-baa and tee-hee and keek-keek and buzz-buzz and schlup-flup – after all of which, what’s wrong, God guide you, with plinkety-plink?  (89-91)

One of those is obscene.  At least one.*  Plenty of the book, and I have only read a quarter of the entire novel, is obscene, or as obscene as a list of words can be,  with, for example, lists of names for organs of the generative kind.  See this excerpt from Volume 3 – search for “protruberance.”  It is the smuttiness of the lexicographer.   The translator, Humphrey Davies, deserves a prize, and a vacation.  Please see this fascinating interview.  “What to do when seventeen Arabic words in a list are all given an identical definition in the Arabic dictionaries?”  The unimprovable 2013 New York University Press edition includes facing-page Arabic – the original language! in a translation not of poetry but a novel! – allowing me to see, just by visual inspection even though I do not know a single character of Arabic, some of the effects Davies is trying to duplicate.

Leg over Leg cooks along a lot faster than Tristram Shandy, so that by the time the first quarter of the novel has ended the protagonist has not only been born but has been schooled and begun his career as a merchant, which I think is actually an allegory for religious conversion – his “goods” are actually ideas is the conceit, I think.

My favorite part of the chapters about education are the warnings of the horrible deaths suffered by everyone who studies grammar – “tetters,” goiter, ulcers, and “a headache (and what a headache!), caused by connective wāw, resumptive wāw, affirmative wāw, supplemental wāw, and negative wāw” (169), none of which exactly encourages the study of Arabic grammar, or any grammar at all. Perhaps I should have instead quoted the preceding paragraph about the categories of metaphors, including “the absquililferous, the vulgaritissimous, the exquipilifabulous,” and so on through the “anal-resonatory,” which may give a hint about the tone in which al-Shidyāq is writing.

Over all, the prologue should be as difficult as possible to understand; a prologue that isn’t serves notice that the book as a whole is poorly written and not worth the reading.  (169)

Well, the book is not that difficult, but I believe I have made its challenges clear enough (although for a more complete review please see Michael Orthofer’s Complete Review).  It is worth knowing the book exists.  This is an Arabic novel from 1855, this crazy thing.

I borrowed the title from p. 247.

*  “schlup-flup” (khāqibāqi)