Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

      هزّ القحوف بشرح قصيد أبي شادوف

      يوسف الشربينيّ

      المجلّد الثاني

      Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded

      Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

      Volume Two

      Edited and translated by

      Humphrey Davies

      Volume editors

      James E. Montgomery

      Geert Jan van Gelder

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

       New York and London

      Table of Contents

      Letter from the General Editor

       Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, Part Two

       An Account of the Lineage of the Poet and Its Components, and of the Place That Took Him to Its Bosom and Gave Him Shelter from His Earliest Moments, and of the Origins of His Fortune and How It Was Brought, and of the Nature of His Beard, Whether It Was Long or Short, and of How, at the End, by Fate He Was O’erthrown, as a Result of Which He Composed This Ode for Which He Became Famous and Well Known.

       The Ode of Abū Shādūf with Commentary

       Some Miscellaneous Anecdotes with Which We Conclude the Book

       Let Us Conclude This Book with Verses from the Sea of Inanities

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      Further Reading

      Index

      About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute

      About this E-book

      Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature

      About the Editor–Translator

      Library of Arabic Literature

      Editorial Board

      General Editor

      Philip F. Kennedy, New York University

      Executive Editors

      James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge

      Shawkat M. Toorawa, Cornell University

      Editors

      Julia Bray, University of Oxford

      Michael Cooperson, University of California, Los Angeles

      Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania

      Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago

      Devin J. Stewart, Emory University

      Editorial Director

      Chip Rossetti

      Digital Production Manager

      Stuart Brown

      Associate Managing Editor

      Gemma Juan-Simó

      Letter from the General Editor

      The Library of Arabic Literature series offers Arabic editions and English translations of significant works of Arabic literature, with an emphasis on the seventh to nineteenth centuries. The Library of Arabic Literature thus includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.

      Books in the series are edited and translated by internationally recognized scholars and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages, and are also made available as English-only paperbacks.

      The Library encourages scholars to produce authoritative, though not necessarily critical, Arabic editions, accompanied by modern, lucid English translations. Its ultimate goal is to introduce the rich, largely untapped Arabic literary heritage to both a general audience of readers as well as to scholars and students.

      The Library of Arabic Literature is supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute and is published by NYU Press.

      Philip F. Kennedy

      General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature

      هزّ القحوف بشرح قصيد أبي شادوف

      المجلّد الثاني

      Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded

      Part Two

      ١،٩

9.1

      بسم الله الرحمٰن الرحيم

      (الحمد لله) ربّ العالمين * والصلاة والسلام على سيّدنا محمّد أشرف النبيّين * وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين * (وبعد) فيقول العبد الفقير إلى الله تعالى يوسف بن محمّد بن عبد الجواد بن خضر الشربينيّ كان الله له ورحم سلفه إنّه لمّا كانت الهمّة البارده * والفكرة الكاسده * تحرّكت أيّامًا قلائل * لتأليف كتاب صار في الأوراق حاصل * في أحوال أهل الريف باتّفاق * وما لهم من نظم ونثر وحبّ واشتياق * وصار جزءًا لا يُرى في الكثافة له شبيه * ولا يكترث به ذو فضل في العلوم نبيه * وكان كالمقدّمة للقصيد * وقد حوى معاني تشبه قحوف الجريد * وخُتِمَ بالأرجوزة الحاوية لما فيه من النثر والأشعار * وغايته أنّه اغتراف من بنات الأفكار * أردت اتّصاله بهذا الجزء الثاني * وحلّ معاني القصيد الّتي عليه مدار تلك المباني * فحرّكتُ فكرتي الخامله * وأطلقتُ عِنان اليراع لبيان تلك الأمور الحاصله * لحلّ معاني نظم القصيد * منسكبًا عليه انسكاب الوابل على الصعيد * بألفاظ يفوح معناها كريح الفَسْوى * ومعاني تشبه في الوضع خابط عَشْوى * فساعدتني الفكرة لما إليه قصدت * وتحرّكت معي لما إليه أردت * وهذا أوان الشروع في المقصود * بعون الملك المعبود * فأقول

      In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

      Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, and blessings and peace upon our master Muḥammad, noblest of prophets, and upon his family and companions, one and all! To proceed. The humble slave of the Almighty, Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jawād ibn Khiḍr al-Shirbīnī declares (and may God be for him and have mercy on his forebears): after frigid determination and sluggish lucubration had bestirred themselves for a few days and been constrained to produce a book that’s now on paper contained, on the conditions of the people of the countryside as it may be, and on their love and longing and their prose and poetry, which work became a Part in coarseness without peer, to which no man of virtue and discerning scholarship would ever give ear, which was to serve as an introduction to the coming Ode, which motifs like the prickly ends of palm fronds included and with an urjūzah—a summary of all that’s in it of poetry and prose—concluded and which, to cut the story short,