reed-reeves princes of the pen
leaf-writ a document, specifically a risālah, any piece of correspondence generated by government secretaries
6.2
nock place the arrow on the bow
palm-apple date
6.3
scrut scrutinize
6.5
happenlore a qiṣṣah, a request for relief, along with an explanation of the circumstances, sent to a judicial official
rede advice
6.6
book-black ink
seed-wool cotton
Notes
Being specific to the Arabic script, the alternating-dots constraint has stumped Ḥarīrī’s translators. Al-Ḥarīzī admits that he is unable to replicate it in Hebrew (which also uses dots, but for different reasons) and simply paraphrases the petition (ed. Chenery, 16). Rückert, who elsewhere substitutes a German constraint for an Arabic one, appears not to do so here. He notes that the challenge is to avoid certain letters, but he does not explain which ones or why (und in welchem Ganz der Buchstab ist vermieden—den auszusprechen dir nicht ist beschieden, 34). As far as I can tell, his translation of the petition does not follow any constraint: it contains all the letters of the German alphabet except q and x, which are relatively rare and easily avoided. Chenery, as usual, gives a literal rendering of the text and explains the trick without trying to duplicate it. Preston, who omits all the other maqāmāt that contain formal manipulations of this kind, does translate this one. But he calls his rendering of the petition “necessarily very jejune” because “it is impossible to convey in English” anything like the alternation of dotted and undotted words (Makamat, p. 323, n. 3; see also p. 311, n. 1).
Of course English does have two dotted letters, i and j. In theory, therefore, Abū Zayd’s feat could be imitated by writing something like “i came, i saw, i conquered,” and so on for about two hundred words, using an E. E. Cummings–style lowercase i to supply the dot. But this solution makes it practically impossible to convey any of the original meaning. My Germanic–Romance solution, conversely, sacrifices the visual dimension of al-Ḥarīrī’s constraint. This I have tried to reproduce in my Englishing of Imposture 26, where Abū Zayd must alternate dotted and undotted letters.
In the narration, the Germanic-only constraint allowed me to use functional words like articles and pronouns, and most basic verbs. For other words, I consulted The Anglish Moot, a wiki bent on “replacing borrowed words in Common English with true English words.” In practice, this means using Germanic words that mean the same thing as their Greek-, Latin-, or French-derived equivalents (e.g., “skill” or “craft” for “art”) or, when none can be found, coining them on the basis of older English or related languages (e.g., “knowhood” for “information”). The wiki contributors have compiled English-Anglish and Anglish-English dictionaries, and have translated (“overset”) a selection of well-known texts. As the editors themselves admit, the notion that such a thing as “true English” really exists is indefensible: given the tangled history of the language, labeling every word as Germanic or Romance is to a certain extent arbitrary. Moreover, it is manifestly untrue that the new coinages are necessarily easier to understand (for these discussions see the page on the “Goals of Anglish”). But, shaky as its foundations may be, “Anglish” can produce some oddly resonant prose (see, e.g., Kingsnorth, The Wake). For the most part I have chosen coinages that can be deciphered without special knowledge.
“Maraaghah” in §6.1 is Marāghah, a city located in what is now northwestern Iran. For “Sahbaan” see notes on §5.1.
“You have said a dreadful say” (§6.3) is a quotation from the Qurʾan: Maryam 19:89.
“Who knows my arrows better than do I” (§6.4) is a proverb drawn from maysir, a game of chance where players cast arrows to win cuts of a slaughtered animal. For the game to work, each player needed to be able to identify his arrow.
“Breakers-Away” in §6.5 refers to the Khawārij, who were originally any one of the many groups that declared themselves opposed to the larger Islamic community in the course of disagreements over leadership during the first two centuries, and, by extension, means “rebels” or “bandits.” “Aboo Naamah” is al-Qaṭarī ibn Fujāʾah, called Abū Naʿāmah (d. 78 or 79/697–98 or 698–99), who led a two-decade-long insurrection against the Umayyads. “If you are a truth-teller . . .” is another Qurʾanic quotation: Shuʿarāʾ 26:154.
In keeping with its elegiac theme, the poem in §6.7 is modeled on Tennyson’s In Memoriam, while the one in §6.8 recasts verses from “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D. S. P. D.” by Jonathan Swift.
Bibliography
The Anglish Moot. http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf.
Kingsnorth, Paul. The Wake. London: Unbound, 2014.
Swift, Jonathan. “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D. S. P. D.” In Irish Poetry, edited by W. J. McCormack. New York: NYU Press, 2000, 32–45, at 40–41.
[Tennyson]. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Memoriam. Edited by William J. Rolfe. Boston: , 1895.
Imposture 7
Gangs of New Saybin
This episode features a blind Abū Zayd and an unidentified old woman working together as peddlers. The old woman distributes copies of a poem containing a request for money and people who wish to keep a copy must pay for it. The poems being their stock in trade, the peddlers are careful to collect all the unwanted copies for reuse. No one is coerced into paying anything, but, like most of Abū Zayd’s other activities, this one entails fraud, in this case because he is not really blind. At the end of this story, he pulls another fast one by eating the food al-Ḥārith offers him and then sneaking out of the house. Presumably he does this to avoid having to sing for his supper, though the reason is never properly explained. In keeping with the theme of well-practiced fraud, all the characters in the English rendering use the argot spoken by mid-nineteenth-century swindlers, thieves, and rowdies in New York, as compiled by George Matsell in his Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon (1859).
7.1El-Hâret Ebn Hammâm whiddled this whole scrap:
I