Leg Over Leg - (Library of Arabic Literature) Abridged by Aḥ & mad Fā & ris Al-Shidyā & q (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 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, all the while celebrating the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language.

Volumes Three and Four see the peripatetic Fariyaq fall in love and convert to Catholicism for twenty-four hours in order to marry. Although the narrative revolves around a series of debates over the nature of male-female relationships, opportunities also arise for disquisitions on the physical and moral significance of such diverse topics as the buttocks, the unreliability of virginity tests, and the human capacity for self-delusion. Lengthy stays in England and France allow for animadversions on the table manners and sexual aberrations of their citizens, but the discussion, whether it involve dance-halls, pleasure gardens, or poetry, almost always ends up returning to gender relations.

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.

Review Quotes

"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"

"...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"

"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"

"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"

"Humphrey Davies 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"

"Humphrey Daviess 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"

"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 dont think Im 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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

About the Author

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 Davies (Translator)
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.