A Reader of Modern Arabic Short Stories E-Book

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This reader consists of the full Arabic texts of eleven short stories by established Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian writers. The earliest story, written in 1929, is by the Egyptian Mahmud Tahir Lashin; and the most recent, written in 1972, is by the Iraqi writer, Fu'ad Al-Takarli. Each story is supplemented by an introduction, with biographical information about the author, placing him in his literary context; a description of the contents; and a brief analysis of the story itself, in English. Ideal for students of Arabic language and literature, the aim of this collection is to encourage a literary appreciation of modern Arabic texts and an understanding of some of the cultural conflicts reflected in the writings. Writers included are Ghalib Halasa, Yahya Haqqi, Yusuf Idris, Idwar El Kharrat and Zakariyya Tamir.

Leseprobe

Edited by

Sabry Hafez and Catherine Cobham

A READER OF MODERN ARABIC SHORT STORIES

SAQI

eISBN 978-0-86356-826-8

First published 1988 by Saqi Books This eBook edition published 2011

Copyright © Sabry Hafez and Catherine Cobham, 1988 and 2011

Copyright for individual texts rests with the authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full cip record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Preface

1 Shams Saghīra by Zakariyya Tāmir

2 Al-Khuṭūba by Bahā’ Ṭāhir

3 Al-Qayẓ by Yūsuf Al-Shārūnī

4 Al-Bashʿa by Ghālib Halasā

5 Fī’l-Qarya by Maḥmūd Al-Badawī

6 Al-Tannūr by Fu’ād Al-Takarlī

7 Bayt min Laḥm by Yūsuf Idrīs

8 Ḥadīth Al-Qarya by Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Lāshīn

9 Imraʿa Miskīna by Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī

10 Ḥikāyāt Ḥawla Ḥādith Ṣaghīr by ʿAbd Al-Ḥakīm Qāsim

11 Jurḥ Maftūḥ by Idwār Al-Kharrāṭ

Preface

It has been the editors’ experience that English-speaking students of Arabic have not always been sufficiently encouraged to understand and appreciate the literary nature of the texts they are required to study and this adds in no small degree to their linguistic difficulties. Our main intention – indeed it was the original motivation behind compiling the Reader – is that the student should be directed towards a literary response to the stories rather than considering them primarily as anthropological curiosities or linguistic and semantic conundrums.

This Reader contains eleven short stories in Arabic, each accompanied by an introduction and notes in English. The introductions are divided into two parts: brief biographical details on the author, followed by a longer section on the story itself. These sections vary in length according to the difficulty or unfamiliarity of the subject matter; their main purpose is to serve as guide and encouragement for the student. They contain both a description of the content of the story and some critical analysis. The latter is meant to suggest and stimulate further response, however, rather than offer a definitive interpretation. (They may be read before or after the Arabic text at the discretion of the student or teacher.)

At the end of each story are notes explaining colloquial and idiomatic words and phrases or idiosyncratic usages not found (or not easily found) in standard modern dictionaries and grammar books. Although in an academic enterprise like the learning of Arabic there is no substitute for long hours with dictionaries and reference grammars and rote learning of personal vocabularies compiled from set texts, these notes should counter some of the frustration of being suddenly confronted by an entirely mysterious word or phrase.

This is not the place to go into the origins of the short story in Arabic, but it is worth bearing in mind a few simple points. Although the immediate literary antecedents of these stories were European, there is a wealth of narrative material, both oral and written, in the Arab tradition: the epic romances – tales of heroes like ‘Antara and Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan – the maqāmāt, Alf Layla wa layla, Al-Bukhalā’ by Al-Jāḥiẓ, Qur’ānic and other religious stories, and the popular tales and humorous anecdotes repeated, modified and embellished down the ages by professional story tellers or others whiling away the time and entertaining their listeners. An important component of the nineteenth-century Arab cultural renaissance was the rediscovery of these literary treasures which had been so patiently and tenaciously preserved down the ages.

The social and cultural upheavals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to promote the growth of a new reading public and to produce changes in literary taste. One of these was the process of urbanization in the Arab world: most readers and writers of fiction were city dwellers even if they came originally from the country, and when village life was featured it was through the eyes of such characters. The gradual spread of secular education encouraged people to look in their reading for an interpretation of the world immediately about them rather than for mere fantasy and rhetorical flamboyance. The growth of the Arabic-language press, particularly from the 1870s onwards, played an important role in changing the expectations of readers and developing the means of expression of the language. Finally, the translation of European fiction from the middle of the nineteenth century not only brought more readers into contact with European thought, but also helped in the formation of a new literary language which gradually moved away from the rhymed prose of the maqāma and the language of the old popular tales towards a mature language of fiction.

The earliest story in the Reader (1929) is by Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Lāshīn, a founder member of the ‘New School’ of the short story which was active in Egypt in the early 1920s. The cultural conflicts presented and the philosophical issues raised in this carefully structured pioneering work of realism seem scarcely less topical today. The most recent story included is the Iraqi writer Fu’ād Al-Takarlī’s Al-Tannūr (1972), a self-confessed experiment on the part of the author and a striking portrayal of a perversion of a traditional crime of honour. In between, there are stories by Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī and Yūsuf Idrīs at the height of their powers, showing in their different ways how the literary and colloquial languages can be fused into an original poetic literary language, and by the Syrian Zakariyya Tāmir and the Jordanian Ghālib Halasā among others. The items have all been chosen for their literary interest and artistic merit and on this basis the selection could have been enlarged and modified many times. The preponderance of Egyptian writers and the absence of women writers largely reflect the literary history of the period spanned by the collection. Inevitably, it also reflects the tastes and specializations of the editors, and the obvious constraints on space. A proposed second volume covering the 1970s and 1980s would have a more even geographical and gender spread.

The Reader is mainly intended as a textbook for fairly advanced undergraduates. Therefore, its stories are ordered not chronologically, but linguistically, from the simple to the more complicated. Depending on the importance given to modern literature in the academic institution in question it could form a course in itself or stories could be selected from it on the basis of their length or difficulty to fit into a more general literature course or to provide a piece of occasional or additional reading. As well as being a prevalent genre in the Arab world for various economic, sociological and other reasons, the short story is a convenient teaching form. Students have the satisfaction of mastering a complete work in a relatively short time, and can be introduced to the work of several writers, sometimes, it is to be hoped, as the prelude to a deeper study of a particular author. In the editors’ experience, there is a growing interest in modern and contemporary literature among students in university Arabic departments but the subject still forms a haphazardly conceived part of many courses. We have used these stories with their introductions and notes in our respective courses on modern Arabic literature in various universities. Thus the method of presentation has been thoroughly tested, the notes amended and the selection modified. As a short anthology containing a selection of some of the best work of some of the most respected short-story writers in the Arab world, the Reader should also be attractive to graduates in Arabic and others who wish to keep up and improve their reading knowledge of Arabic and understanding of the culture.

We should like to thank the writers whose stories appear in this Reader for their co-operation in supplying us with biographical information, and for kindly allowing us to reproduce their work. We are grateful to the heirs of the late M.T. Lāshīn, and to Mrs Layla al-Badawī, daughter of the late Maḥmūd al-Badawī, who gave us permission to publish her father’s story. Mr Badawī himself was helpful to us in the earlier stages of the preparation of the Reader but sadly died before its completion.

We should also like to thank all those who commented on earlier drafts of the Reader, especially Mustafa Badawī, Pierre Cachia, Owen Wright, John Hunwick and Ronak Hussein. We are also grateful to our students whose observations encouraged us to persevere with this project. Full responsibility for omissions and errors rests with us.

1

Shams Saghīra

Zakariyya Tāmir

1. Zakariyya Tāmir

Zakariyya Tāmir was born in 1929 in Damascus. After he had finished compulsory primary education he was apprenticed to a blacksmith, but later became interested in politics and was encouraged by contact with intellectuals to continue his education at night school. He read voraciously and was provoked by his reading, as he later said in an interview, ‘to create a voice which [he] hadn’t been able to find [there]’ (Al-Maʿrifa, August 1972). His intention was to represent in his writing the very poor majority of men and women in Syria, with their joyless and restricted existence; these were for him the materially and spiritually deprived members of the society rather than the more picturesque characters like beggars and sellers of lottery tickets whom he accuses the ‘soi-disant committed writers’ of concentrating on almost exclusively. His claims to have taken a new direction were certainly borne out by the great influence he was to have on short-story writing, especially in Syria, Iraq and Egypt. On the other hand he began writing in a literary climate influenced by predecessors and near-contemporaries such as ʿAbd Al-Salām Al-ʿUjaylī, Saʿīd Hūrāniyya and Mutāʿ Ṣafadī in Syria and the Egyptian writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Yahyā Haqqī, particularly in his two collections Qindīl Umm Hāshim (1944) and Dimā’ Wa Ṭīn (1955). Tāmir published his first collection of short stories in 1960 and since then has published seven other collections and many individual stories. He also writes children’s stories and works as a freelance journalist. He left Syria in the early 1980s and has lived in the UK ever since.

When he became a writer and journalist he joined a different social milieu from the one he had been born into but he tended to view the sufferings of his fellow intellectuals from the outside, retaining the memories and perceptions of poverty and deprivation from his own early life. In many of his stories he emulates or parodies popular folk-tales and plays with time, place and subject matter in a ‘magical’ way, juxtaposing things which are not normally found together and breaking down the barriers between dreams and reality. The syntax and vocabulary of his stories are simple and the complexity and ambiguity in them are not to be found in the thought processes or actions of his characters but in their dreams and fantasies. These dreams, or illusions, or substitutes for thought, help people to bear their lives but are also perhaps indicative of a lust for a more beautiful life and a desire for change, as well as being sources of deadly frustration.

The act of killing also figures in nearly all of Tāmir’s stories. It is often described in sensuous detail and presented as a positive act, a removing of obstacles. It is a shock tactic at the same time, used to awaken the reader to the continuous clash between human beings and oppressive authorities, and as such is relevant to the everyday realities of life in Syria rather than to a general metaphysical view of the human situation. Tāmir views the particular situation of his characters as nightmarish and oppressive, and his simple images of power and beauty, often referring to animals, the countryside or natural phenomena, make moments of brightness that eventually only emphasize the extent to which darkness and injustice have penetrated, leaving nothing in the society untouched.

2. Shams Saghīra

Abū Fahd, the hero of ‘Shams Saghīra’ (1963), is a Chaplinesque figure as he walks down the narrow alleys of a poor quarter of Damascus after three glasses of arak, singing to himself. He begins to find his harsh voice beautiful and he has a momentary picture of a rapturous reception from a large audience, but before his dream becomes sentimental he laughs at himself and continues on his way singing with even greater delight.

His encounter with the sheep is described in matter-of-fact, humorous terms. It is strange to find a sheep wandering without an owner and, magically , it speaks and promises him gold, but the narrative is mainly concerned with Abū Fahd who tries to drive it along or pull it by its little horns, and finally carries it on his back, because initially it represents to him a huge supply of free meat.

The mixture of tenderness and irritation shown by Abū Fahd’s wife when he returns home is portrayed delicately in few words; for example, when he is tired and dispirited she abandons her scepticism and supplies him with information about the habits of the jinn, and then, when he sets out again she is timorous but instinctively helps him gird himself for battle, winding the sash around his waist. This has the effect of refining the popular-comic nature of the scene of the couple in bed discussing what they will buy and how they will change their lives and that of their unborn child when they are rich. There is a hint that their child may have a life as circumscribed as theirs, as they plan his future career for him, but this sardonic note does not seem to indicate cynicism towards the characters, rather some bitterness and anger from the author that they humiliate themselves unconsciously in their daily lives.

The fantasy ends when a man, drunk as Abū Fahd was, or may have been, appears under the bridge and spoils the chances of the sheep returning; and yet humorously and ironically the drunk misconstrues Abū Fahd’s reasons for loitering under the bridge and quickly builds his own fantasy about a woman in whom he can have a share.

The violence which thwarts Abū Fahd and destroys him at the point where he believes he is measuring up to reality and is about to realize his dreams is described dispassionately as if the fight were a fairly matched contest or a strange dance. At the same time it turns out to be a harshly real event breaking in suddenly on a gentle tale. As Abū Fahd dies the dream returns too late and the gold he was promised falls on the ground in a heap, like a ‘little sun’ tumbling from the sky.

3. The Text

.

4. Textual Notes

1 : perhaps an ironic name in the context of the popular-comic tradition which forms a strand of the story.

2 : this old popular song about a defeated, frustrated man was made famous by Sayyid Darwish, the Egyptian singer of the 1920s.

3 : this aniseed-based drink is the cheapest form of spirits in the Middle East.

4 : although the author does not describe Abū Fahd, one or two details about his appearance convey the impression that he is a poor, old-fashioned Syrian. The everyday wearing of tarbūsh gradually died out in the Middle East during the 1950s and early 1960s, so the story is set a little way back in time, perhaps to complement the elements of macabre fairy-tale in it without losing touch with the contemporary reference of the realism.

5 : baggy trousers tied at the waist with a kind of cummerbund, still worn at the time by some working-class Syrians.

6 Variations on such folk-tales abound, where a person meets some small animal who turns out to have magic powers and offers him or her undreamt-of wealth.

7 : ‘cracked wheat’; boiled and sometimes mixed with other things, this is one of the staple foods of the poor in Syria.

2

Al-Khuṭūba

Bahā’ Ṭāhir

1. Bahā’ Ṭāhir

Bahā’ Ṭāhir was born in 1935 in Giza near Cairo where he went to school. His parents were originally from Karnak in Upper Egypt and he spent several long summer vacations there. He graduated in history from Cairo University in 1956. While he was still a student he began working as a translator in the state Department of Information and stayed there until 1957 when he was appointed to the staff of Cairo Radio. After postgraduate work at Cairo University first in modern history and later in mass communications, he taught part-time for a number of years in the Institute of Cinema and Dramatic Art and in the Faculty of Mass Communication. In 1968 he became a co-director of the Second Programme (the specialized cultural station of Cairo Radio), but in 1975 he was accused of having left-wing sympathies in a dispute which he saw as concerning the Programme’s literary values, editorial freedom and artistic standards. He was demoted to the Foreign Service of Cairo Radio as head of a proposed drama unit which in fact never came into being. In 1977 he began to work as a freelance translator for UNESCO and other UN organizations, and travelled widely as a result. In 1981 he was appointed as a full-time translator at the UN in Geneva, where he worked and lived until he retired in 1995. He returned to Egypt and has lived in Cairo ever since.

Although Ṭāhir started writing short stories and one-act plays in the 1950s, his first story was not published until 1964. Since then he has published articles (in the periodicals Al-Masraḥ and Al-Kātib among others), several plays, five collections of short stories and seven novels, the latest of which won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. Although not a prolific writer until later in his career, he has had a considerable influence on his contemporaries perhaps because of the disciplined clarity of his style and its apparent conventionality. In his short stories, he depicts mundane situations using unadorned language and a sentence structure that is sometimes exaggeratedly simple. However, he arranges them in a certain context and selects angles or supplies nuances to show the treachery and strangeness that can lie beneath the surface of normal encounters and occurrences.

2. Al-Khuṭūba

‘Al-Khuṭūba’ (1968) is the title story of Ṭāhir’s first collection which came out in 1972. It starts out as the story of what, in Egypt at least, is a routine situation: a young man going to the father of a female colleague at work to ask for her hand in marriage. But this normal situation turns into an unnerving and at times quietly horrific story, as the father interrogates the young man, and plots and conspiracies are brought to light which extend in time and space beyond the stuffy guest room on a dull afternoon.

Dialogue is of great importance in the story. The dialogue is not in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, but it represents dramatically the changing emotions of the two characters – boredom, apprehension, fear, relief – in the structure and rhythm of the sentences as well as in the choice of words. It is a story of manipulation and harassment and finally torture, but the main instruments are words.

The whole story may be seen both as a sustained hyperbole, because of the astonishing ways in which facts appear to be constantly denied or distorted, and as a sarcastic understatement, because of the subdued and routine nature of the situation. It is an allegory for the author’s idea of the moral anarchy existing in some areas of life in contemporary Egypt but within the text there are few images or detailed descriptions. A scattering of graphic details, as when the hero’s attention is apparently irrelevantly caught by the sight of the father’s heel appearing from his slipper, ‘smooth and clean and very white, like a big egg’, gives the reader a vivid visual representation of the close alliance of the bizarre and the intimate, or the fundamental and the trivial, which permeates the whole story.