Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Ysuf al-ShirbnsBrains Confounded pits the coarse rural masses against the refined urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbn describes the three rural typespeasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervishoffering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Ab Shdf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbn responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence.

Volume Two ofBrains Confounded is followed byRisible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypts countryside.Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabb. Together,Brains ConfoundedandRisible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era.

An English-only edition.

Ysuf al-Shirbn (Author)
Ysuf al-Shirbnwas a well-educated Egyptian from the eleventh/seventeenth century, thought to originate from the town of Shirbn, then a significant rural center in the eastern part of Delta. Little is known about him--including his social standing and profession--beyondBrains Confounded and two other extant texts:The Pearls(Al-Lali wa-l-durar) andThe Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls(ar al-madar li-all al-lali wa-l-durar).

Youssef Rakha (Foreword by)
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, poet, and photographer. His first novels to appear in English areThe Crocodiles andThe Book of the Sultans Seal, a literary experiment inspired by medieval Cairo historians, which won the 2015 Banipal Seif Ghobash Prize for Paul Starkeys translation.

Humphrey Davies (Translator)
Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-AswanysThe Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, includingGate of the Sun, and Amad Fris al-ShidyqsLeg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-periodBrains Confounded by the Ode of Ab Shdf Expounded by Ysuf al-Shirbn, as well as editions and translations of al-TnissIn Darfurand al-SanhrsRisible Rhymesfrom the same era. In addition, he hascompiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitledAl-mmiyyah al-miriyyah al-maktbah: mukhtrt min 1400 il 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.