Download PDF by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Humphrey Davies: Leg over Leg: Volumes One and Two

By Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Humphrey Davies

ISBN-10: 1479800724

ISBN-13: 9781479800728

Leg over Leg recounts the lifestyles, from beginning to center age, of “the Fariyaq,” modify ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal determine within the highbrow and literary background of the fashionable Arab global. The continuously edifying and infrequently hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he strikes from his local Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, give you the writer with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the highbrow and social problems with his time, together with the lack of awareness and corruption of the Lebanese spiritual and secular institutions, freedom of sense of right and wrong, women’s rights, sexual relationships among women and men, the manners and customs of Europeans and center Easterners, and the variations among modern eu and Arabic literatures, all of the whereas celebrating the genius and sweetness of the classical Arabic language.

Volumes One and stick with the hapless Fariyaq via his early life and early schooling, his misadventures one of the clergymen of Mount Lebanon, his flight to the Egypt of Muhammad ’Ali, and his next employment with the first Arabic day-by-day newspaper—during which era he suffers a couple of illnesses that parallel his growth within the sciences of Arabic grammar, and engages in fun digressions at the desk manners of the Druze, younger love, snow, and the scandals of the early papacy. this primary publication additionally sees the list—of destinations in Hell, varieties of medieval glue, tools of torture, stars and pre-Islamic idols—come into its personal as a signature gadget of the work.

Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg a piece that's precise and unclassifiable. It used to be at first broadly condemned for its assaults on authority, its non secular skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later variants have been usually abridged. this is often the 1st entire English translation of this groundbreaking work.

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Additional resources for Leg over Leg: Volumes One and Two

Sample text

His final journey, in a life of traveling, was to Cairo in 1886, in order to confer with the press about its publication. A fellow author and literary biographer described his visit: Old age had overtaken him, dimmed his eyes, and bent his back; but he had lost nothing of his keenness or intelligence. 28 Eloquent and profane until the last, al-Shidyāq died, shortly after his return from Egypt, in the village of Kadiköy, on September 20, 1887. Some biographers claim that he converted back to Maronite Catholicism on his deathbed, but his own final wishes seem to contradict this.

In cobbling together this multigeneric work, he renders no mode privileged over any other. Instead, he incorporates all into his narrative archive, to praise and discredit equally. As a result, there is no stable position of narrative authority in Leg over Leg, a fact perhaps announced by the work’s title itself. In a text abounding in sexual puns and innuendos, “leg over leg” could refer to an intimate union of limbs or the detached posture of an armchair academic. Moreover, this single phrase signals the linguistic and structural play built into all aspects of the work: “al-sāq ʿalā l-sāq” also appears within the text in a list of the conventional topoi of courtship narratives, which interrupts the very courtship story that the narrator is trying to tell: It is the custom of my fellow writers sometimes to go back and leap over a period of time and connect an event that happened before it to an event that happened after it.

In the course of this, the author will relate such long and tedious matters as how his face paled and his pulse raced when he met her, how he was reduced to a tizzy and felt ill while he waited for her answer, how he sent her an old woman or a missive, how he met with her at such and such a time and place, and how she changed color when he spoke to her of the bed, of drawing her close, of embracing, of leg over leg, of kissing, of kissing tongue to tongue, of intercourse, and the like. 1) The “and the like” that mockingly ends this list opens it up to parodic criticism, gesturing simultaneously toward infinite substitutability on the one hand and the impossibility of precise equivalence on the other—signaling both the mechanisms and limits of representation that will be explored throughout the text (which reaches the absurd in the secondary reading of the title, “The Turtle in the Tree”).

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Leg over Leg: Volumes One and Two by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Humphrey Davies


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