Читать книгу Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, with Risible Rhymes - Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī - Страница 10

IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MERCIFUL, THE COMPASSIONATE

9.1

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, was a dollop of my inspired thought, I determined to add thereto this second part and unravel the meanings of the Ode, which are the point from which its formal constructions depart; so I set my lethargic brain to work, allowing my pen on the elucidation of the matters therein to go berserk and to unravel the motifs that the Ode contains, descending upon it like a downpour on Upper Egypt when it rains, with expressions whose sense wafts about like a fart, and motifs thrown together without method or art. And indeed, my brain assisted me in that for which I strove and bestirred itself with me to attain the goal at which I drove; and now’s the moment to set out in pursuit of that thing, with the help of God, the Worshipped King. I therefore declare: