Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside.
The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Y¿suf al-Shirb¿n¿'s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab¿ Sh¿d¿f Expounded, which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems-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¿.
Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes offers intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanh¿r¿'s day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era.
A bilingual Arabic-English edition.