Details

ISBN-10: 1479810568
ISBN-13: 9781479810567
Publisher: New York University Press
Publish Date: 09/07/2021
Dimensions: 8.30" L, 5.80" W, 1.30" H

Impostures

Translator: Michael Cooperson
Foreword by: Abdelfattah Kilito

Paperback

Price: $15.00

Overview

One of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Books of the Year

Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category

Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award

Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category

Fifty rogue’s tales translated fifty ways

An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature.

Impostures follows the roguish Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī in his adventures around the medieval Middle East–we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English.

Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation.

An English-only edition.

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Reviews
"[An] astounding new adaptation of the Maqāmāt of al-Harīrī... The verbal profusion is ludicrous, joyfully so. Speaking to an interviewer, Mr. Cooperson remarked that the Maqāmāt is 'a book that shows off everything that Arabic can do.' Impostures shows off English in the same flattering light, demonstrating its dynamism, its endurance, its mutability and its glorious, weedy wildness. In this way, a translation that is so brazen in its liberties is faithful to the spirit of the original."– "Wall Street Journal"
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Details

ISBN-10: 1479810568
ISBN-13: 9781479810567
Publisher: New York University Press
Publish Date: 09/07/2021
Dimensions: 8.30" L, 5.80" W, 1.30" H
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