124qarn: cf. Latin cornu, French corne, etc.
125ṣābūn: cf. Latin sāpon-, English “soap,” French savon.
126qiṭṭ: cf. Latin cattus, English “cat,” French chat.
127mazj: not in fact cognate with English “mix” or French mélange, etc.
128Cf. “the horns of the righteous shall be exalted” (Ps. 75:10) and “in my name shall his horn be exalted” (Ps. 89:24), etc.
129“the word itself is not derived from any verb” etc.: typically, Arab scholars of the classical period regarded nouns as derived from verbs; in this case, however, there is no verb with a meaning related to the noun qarn in either its literal or figurative senses.
130Jirmānūs (Germanus) Farḥāt (1670–1732) was a Maronite cleric, grammarian, lexicographer, poet, and educator from Aleppo; his Bāb al-iʿrāb ʿan lughat al-Aʿrāb is an updating of the Qāmūs. Jirmānūs’s efforts, portrayed as part of a “revival” of literary Arabic are sometimes better understood in the context of the transition from Syriac, the original spoken and literary language of many Levantine Christians. On Farḥāt’s life and works, see Kristen Brustad, “Jirmānūs Jibrīl Farḥāt,” in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350–1850, edited by Joseph Lowry and Devin J. Stewart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 242–51.
131Abū l-ʿIbar, etc.: one of the most famous buffoons and comic poets of his age, whose real name was Abū l-ʿAbbās Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Hāshimī (ca. 175–250/791–864). Having changed his kunyah (“patronymic”) from Abū l-ʿAbbās to Abū l-ʿIbar (“Father of Warnings” or “of Tears”), he thereafter added a letter with each succeeding year, ending with the nonsensical appellation given above. His works include a comic sermon on marriage. See further Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 1:37.
132“from the drain” (mina l-balūʿah): the sense is not obvious but perhaps recalls some anecdote concerning Abū l-ʿIbar.
133The humor of many of the following anecdotes seems to lie in the unexpected and, especially, ridiculous nature of the protagonist’s actions and reactions and the crossed purposes at which he always seems to be with his interlocutors.
134The joke being perhaps that the response fails to answer the question either way.
135The formulation of the question seems to imply a fuller version, such as “If he grew large, I’d ask him ‘Why…’ etc.” This would be ridiculous, since the man cannot control how he grows and hence cannot be blamed for it.
136The humor may lie in the phrase “to see her” (li-anẓurahā), which might be taken to mean “to cast the evil eye on her.”
137“May God be protected from every eye!” (tabāraka llāhu min kulli ʿayn): the man confuses the verbs bāraka and tabāraka.
138Buhlūl, ʿUlayyān: moralizing “wise fools” of the early Abbasid period (see Naysābūrī, ʿUqalāʾ).
139Ṭuways: Abū ʿAbd al-Munʿim ʿĪsā ibn ʿAbdallāh (10–92/632–711), nicknamed Ṭuways (“Little Peacock”), a celebrated singer and mukhannath (“effeminate”) of Medina during the early days of Islam, known for his comical sayings.
140Muzabbid: Muzabbid al-Madanī, a much-cited early Medinan comic.
141The Fāriyāq: the author seems to have forgotten that the Fāriyāq is already speaking.
142“waist-bands” (himyān): i.e., sashes, in which money was carried.
143“The Fāriyāq’s father was one of those who sought to depose the emir” etc.: Yūsuf, Fāris’s father, though employed by Emir Bashīr II al-Shihābī, became involved in a 1819 Druze revolt against him, led by his relatives Emir Ḥasan ʿAlī and Emir Sulaymān Sayyid Aḥmad and caused by his ever more oppressive tax levies. With the failure of the uprising, Yūsuf fled along with these to Damascus, where he died in 1821 (on the political situation in Mount Lebanon in the early nineteenth century and the Shidyāq family’s role in it, see Ussama Makdisi, The Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)), 72–76, al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, 47–48, and Paul Starkey Fact and Fiction in al-Sāq ʿalā l-Sāq, in Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor, and Stephan Wild (eds.), Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 1998), 36).
144“a tambour” (ṭunbūr): a long-necked fretted lute. According to Starkey, the author uses “the ṭanbūr as a symbol of art, of freedom, almost of life itself” (Starkey, Fact and Fiction, 36).
145“their Frankish shaykhs”: i.e., the clergy of the Roman Catholic church, with which the Maronite church is in communion.
146“schlup-flup” (khāqibāqi): “the sound of the vagina during intercourse” (Qāmūs).
147“A Priest and a Pursie, Dragging Pockets and Dry Grazing” (Fī qissīs wa-kīs wa-taḥlīs wa-talḥīs): the priest is mentioned at 1.5.8, the pursie at 1.5.10; taḥlīs does not occur in the dictionaries but may be based on maḥlūs (a word already used, see 1.1.6) which, according to the Qāmūs, means “scantly fleshed” (of the vagina), in which case it would relate to the figurative use of “pursie” (see n. 10 below) in such sentences as “When my pursie grew light while within your Happy Purlieu, which is to say, when it grew to be a drag…” and/or on iḥlās meaning “bankruptcy”; talḥīs is likewise absent from the dictionaries but may be based on laḥisat al-māshiyatu l-arḍ (“the herds grazed the land to the roots”), in which case it would refer to the Fāriyāq’s general state of penury.
148“whose name rhymes with Baʿīr Bayʿar”: i.e., Amīr [= Emir] Ḥaydar [ibn Aḥmad al-Shihābī] (1763–1835), cousin of Emir Bashīr II, ruler of Mount Lebanon (see 1.1.20, n. 117). The book referred to in the following lines as “ledgers” is Ḥaydar ibn Aḥmad’s Al-Ghurar al-ḥisān fī taʾrīkh ḥawādith al-zamān, a history of Lebanon from the earliest times to the Egyptian invasion of 1831.
149Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), writer, poet, and politician; for these quotations, see Alphonse de Lamartine, Oeuvres de A. Lamartine: Méditations Poétiques (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1838), 21, 23–24, and 25. The author’s translations of Lamartine and Chateaubriand that follow are discussed by Alwan, who characterizes them as “smooth, readable, and reasonably accurate” (Alwan, Aḥmad, chap. 3).
150ʿAntar ibn Shaddād: a pre-Islamic poet whose life gave rise at a later date to a popular epic of chivalry.
151The name of the deity is used to express deep feeling incited by music or poetry.
152Poetry’s Destiny, etc.: Lamartine’s essay is entitled Des destinées de la poésie and contains the words “je vois… des générations rajeunies… qui reconstruiront… cette oeuvre infinie que Dieu a donné à faire et à refaire sans cesse à l’homme, sa propre destinée. Dans cette oeuvre la poésie a sa place.” (Lamartine, Oeuvres 56).
153François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848): writer, politician, diplomat, and historian, considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature, who lived in America from 1791 to 1792. The originals of the two passages quoted below are to be found at Chateaubriand, Oeuvres complètes de Chateaubriand, vol. 6, Voyages en Amérique, en Italie, au Mont Blanc: Mélanges littéraires (Paris: Garnier, [1861]), 54 and 62.