1.11.8
“This is why so few people write works on grammar in this day and age: under such circumstances, the writer exposes himself to criticism, vilification, and tribulation and no one will pay any attention to the useful information and maxims in his book, unless it be replete with every kind of stylistic embellishment and linguistic nicety. It’s as though a virtuous man were to go into a gathering dressed in rags and tatters; they wouldn’t see his inner refinement, only his outer clothing and attire. Thank God there are so few writers in our country these days: if they were to increase — and, along with them, their criticism and fault-finding — the occasions for their mutual hatred and quarrelsomeness would increase in proportion. People have substituted for serious writing the concoction of a few paragraphs in rhymed prose that they put in letters and the like, as when they say ‘salutation and veneration’ or ‘the splendid and resplendent,’ these being easiest to take when pronounced without vowels at the end.212 As far as poetry in this day and age is concerned, it consists merely of describing a man who is the subject of a eulogy as generous and brave or of a woman as having a slender waist, heavy nates, and an eye with collyrium laced. Anyone who sets out to compose a poem fills up most of its lines with amatory and erotic or plaintive and querulous material and keeps the rest for eulogy.”
1.11.9
This brilliant pupil continued to read grammar with his shaykh until he got to the chapter on the “doer” and the “done,”213 when he objected to the fact that the doer was “raised” while the done was “laid,”214 claiming that the terminology was corrupt, for if the doer was raised then someone else must have raised him, whereas in fact it was the doer who did the work, the evidence being that we may observe a man working on a building raising a stone or the like on his shoulder, in which case the stone is the thing raised and the doer is the raiser, and likewise the doer of the… 215 is the one who raises his leg. At this point, the tutor told him, “Steady on! Steady on! You’re being foul-mouthed. In the scholarly gathering — which is quite different from the princely — you’re supposed to demonstrate good manners.” Then the two pupils concluded the reading of the book, neither having benefited in any way, and the commentary might as well have been directed entirely at the Fāriyāq who, from then on, took to improving his speech by following the rules of grammar till he came to scare the pants off the rabble as will become clear in the following chapter.
CHAPTER 12: A DISH AND AN ITCH
1.12.1
I must go on at some length in this chapter, just to test the reader’s endurance. If he gets to the end of it at one go without his teeth smoking with rage, his knees knocking together from frustration and fury, the place between his eyes knitting in disgust and shame, or his jugulars swelling in wrath and ire, I shall devote a separate chapter to his praise and count him among those readers “who are steadfast.”216 And because the Fāriyāq had become prone in those days to making a long tongue at people — even though his brains remained quite short and his head quite small and exiguous at the occiput — and I had taken a vow to follow along behind him step by step, mimicking the way he walked, if I saw him doing something stupid I would do the same, wandering off the path if he did, and matching too anything sensible he did, for otherwise I’d be his foe, not the writer of his life story or the reporter of his sayings. An injunction to do the same should be hung around the necks of all writers, who, in fact, are very far from obeying it. I observe that most of them depart from this approach, and you suddenly find such a writer, in the middle of describing a disaster that has affected some mortal’s sanity, wife, or wealth, going to the trouble of inserting paragraphs in rhymed prose and expressions full of parallelisms, padding his story with all sorts of metaphors and metonymies, and forgetting all about his subject’s worries, thus indicating that he doesn’t care about them. As a result you find the victim moaning and wailing, objecting and complaining, while the author is rhyming and using paronomasia, making parallel constructions and puns, going off on tangents, switching persons,217 and playing with unlikely topoi, as when he reaches out his hand now to the sun, now to the stars, trying to bring them from the zenith of the heavens down to the lowly level of his words, or, on some occasions, plows across oceans and at others plucks orchids while bounding around in garden and thicket from trunk to branch and from hollow to hill. Such, though, is not my way of doing things, for if I introduce the words of an idiot, I put every kind of silly expression in his mouth, and if I report something said by an emir, I use, to the extent possible, polite language, as though I were sitting with him in this salon; or by a priest, for example, or a bishop, I make him a gift of every variety of lame and defective phrase so that it isn’t too difficult for him to express himself, which, should it happen, would undermine the purpose of writing this book.
1.12.2
Know, then, that after the Fāriyāq’s brains had boiled over following the application of the heat of grammar, which came on top of his desire to be a poet, he set off one day to take care of some business. On the road he passed a monastery and, it being evening, thought it would be a good idea to spend the night there. Turning off to it, he knocked on the door, at which a young monk appeared before him. “Can you provide a guest with bed and board?” the Fāriyāq asked, to which the young monk replied, “He’d be most welcome so long as he has no sword.” The Fāriyāq was delighted with this response and amazed to find in the monastery someone who was good at repartee. The young monk had only said what he did because numbers of the large-gulleted, omnivorous, gluttonous, voracious, craving, dyspeptic, ravenous, loudly swallowing followers of the emir afflicted the monastery with their demands for lodging, and, whenever one of them spent the night there, he would charge the monks with providing fine dishes that they knew nothing of, for these folk live a life of short commons and abnegation, surviving on the most meager ration, regarding, as they do, this world and its pleasures as their foe; it is to them the arch-rival of the life to come, and the further mortal man distances himself from it, the closer he approaches Paradise. Even their bread, which they often eat plain, is unlike other people’s, for after they’ve baked it in thin layers, they expose it to the sun for several days in rows until it dries and gets so hard that if one were to take a loaf in each hand and strike them against each other, the din would panic all the rats in the monastery, or they could use them in place of the wooden plank they strike to mark the times of prayer, and they can eat it only after it’s been soaked in water so long it has turned back to dough. The emir’s followers wear swords to terrify those who pay them less than total respect and to warn them of the consequences, in just the same manner as the Fāriyāq terrified the young monk with his question. If one of them doesn’t have a sword, he borrows his friend’s or takes a thin stick and puts it in a scabbard. The people of the Mountain find nothing shameful about borrowing provisions or other things; on the contrary, they often borrow jewelry and apparel for the bride for her procession and borrow clothes and a turban for the groom to make him look smart.