And his father said to him, “If you were away from us, would you be able to write us a letter?” and he replied, “Yes. I’d write it and bring it to you, too.” And he heard his father singing the praises of some silk-wool he’d bought and with which he was delighted, so the man said, “It would have been a fortunate hour if you hadn’t bought it.” And he saw his father writing a letter and said to him, “Father, can you read what you write?” and the father replied, “How could I not when I am the one who wrote it?” “For my part,” the man said, “I cannot.” And he saw that his father was upset over a bird he had lost and told him, “God bless the hour in which it flew away!” so his father said to him, “You imbecile, I’m upset at its loss.” “So why didn’t you build it a house?” responded the man. “Can one build a house for a bird?” asked the father. “All I mean,” said the man “is two sticks going from here to there.”
1.3.6
And once he described some animals he’d seen, saying, “They included a pig that was larger than me.” And he complained of a pain in his foot and said, “I wish this foot would rot away.” And his father was explaining to him the meaning of “to save” and said to him, “If someone fell into the fire, for example, and you went and pulled him out, that would be saving him,” to which the man replied, “But he would have burned up, so how could I save him? Suppose I stuck this skewer into the fire and pulled him out with it, would that be saving?” And once another was explaining to him the meaning of “to reproach” and said to him, “If someone was slow in doing something for you and you said to him, ‘Why were you so slow? Why were you so slothful?’ that would be reproaching,” and the man said, “And I’d tell him too, ‘Why did you grow large? Why did you grow small? Why did you grow short?’”135
1.3.7
And his mother reproached him for snorting when he spoke, and he replied, “You should reproach not me but my breath.” And his father wanted to go out one day when it was raining but decided against it because of the rain, so he said to his mother, “Mother, it’s a blessing from God that we didn’t go out today, for the weather was fine.” And his mother bought him a length of cloth and when she had had it made up he said to her, “Will the color of this cloth fade?” “I don’t know,” she replied. “I hope that it does,” he said, “because it might look better.” And once in the winter, when he was wearing only a shift, his mother said to him, “Wear your robe over your shift!” and he told her, “No. It’ll make me colder.”
1.3.8
And his father reproached him for shrieking as he read out loud, and he said, “I can’t shout any louder.” And one day he couldn’t think of the meaning of the word “visit,” so his mother said to him, “If I were to go today to such and such a lady to see her, I would be visiting her.” He responded, “I deduce from this that you’re going to her to play a trick on her.”136 And his mother said to him, “Such and such a lady who was kind to you has died,” and he was silent for a while and then said, “I have mourned for her as I would for my mother. May God send her and her husband to Heaven this minute!” And one day he told his father, “Today our teacher bought a rod to beat the children, and now they are making him angry in order to make him beat them with it till it breaks, which will be a relief to me too.”
1.3.9
And he told his mother, who had fallen sick, “If we brought you a doctor and God wasn’t willing to cure you, what would be the point of the medicine?” And on another occasion he said to her, “Use this medicine. It may make you sick.” And one day he wanted to light the fire, so he said, “I wanted to put it out but it wouldn’t go out.” And his mother told him, “Go to such and such a woman and ask her, ‘Why are you afraid of my mother? She’s a human being like you,’” so he told her, “I’m going to tell her, ‘My mother asks you, “Why will you have nothing to do with her when she’s an animal just like you?”’” And once he said of something he admired, “May God be protected from every eye!”137 And once he was told, “So and so wants to take you to his school to teach you” and he replied, “May God send him to Heaven!” His father asked him, “Do you want to kill him?” “What should I say then?” he asked. His father replied, “Say, ‘God prolong his life!’” “He already has,” said the man. And he asked his mother, “Will you give me some of that halvah tonight?” and she said to him, “If we live to see the night.” He responded, “We’re going to live to see the morrow, so how could we not see the night?” End.
1.3.10
An intelligent person of his country came to learn of these things and said to the Fāriyāq, “It appears to me that these sayings are dumb and disturbed, or dotty and deranged, or feather-brained and feeble-minded, or confounded and befuddled, or bedazed and confused, so how could he have gone on to become a poet?” The Fāriyāq told him, “Probably he intended, with these sayings of his, to make his parents laugh, or maybe his first impulses were slow-minded but his more carefully thought-out responses quick-witted. Some people are so put off their stroke by a question that they can only answer wrongly, but if they put their brains to work when they’re on their own, they perform excellently. Or maybe his intention in doing so was to become noted and celebrated among men, if only for foolishness and folly, for most people seek fame by any means possible.
1.3.11
“Some practice the translation of books and teaching when they know nothing, despite which they derive pleasure from putting their names at the beginning of the book and stuffing it with feeble phrases and stupid statements that they make up themselves, or in having others report their sayings so that it may be said, ‘So and so said thus and such,’ the statement itself being erroneous and pointless. Others sit cross-legged at the forefront of the salon among their brethren and peers and suddenly start telling tales of far-away countries, mixing their words with a few phrases from foreign languages that they have learned. Thus they will say to them, for example, sans façon, and pardon, monsieur, and dunque, and very well to show that they have spent a lot of time touring France, Italy, and England and have learned their languages, though they are ignorant of the language in which they were brought up.
1.3.12
“Some wear large turbans like those worn by certain scholars of religion, for a large turban is supposed to indicate a large head and a large head is supposed to indicate an excellent mind and sound judgment. Some affect to imitate some nasal intonation of those who are known for the chasteness of their speech, and you find them using high-sounding terms and chewing their words inside their mouths and using words inappropriately.
1.3.13
“But, to return to your original question: the poet does not have to be sensible, or a philosopher. Many madmen were poets. Examples are Abū l-ʿIbar, Buhlūl, ʿUlayyān,138 Ṭuways,139 and Muzabbid.140 The philosophers have stated that poetry is the first product of rapture and that the best of it is that which has its origins in rapture and amorous infatuation, which explains why the poetry of sedate scholars is always feeble.”
1.3.14
When the Fāriyāq141 heard this, he renounced poetry in favor of committing rare words to heart. It wasn’t long, however, before he reverted to his first nature, the reason being that his father took him with him to a certain distant village to collect the taxes imposed on its inhabitants and deliver them to the ruler’s treasury. The people of the village put his father up in grand style, and, living close to where he was staying, was a girl of surpassing beauty. Despite his tender age, the Fāriyāq began to look on her with the eyes of the star-struck paramour, according to the custom of novices in love of first falling in love with girls who are their neighbors, because they believe the goal is easily reached and because they can make use of their relationship as neighbors to plead their cause. Similarly, the girl neighbors usually sigh over their boy neighbors and wink at them as a way of signaling that there’s no need to go looking for a distant physician when the cure is close at hand. Old hands at love, however, look far afield and cruise the most distant grazing grounds, for, having made it their custom and habit to give in to every fancy of their souls, they feel it an obligation and a duty to make things difficult for themselves, and they find enormous pleasure in distancing themselves from the beloved and falling sick over her; any who opens his mouth in the hope that the fruit will fall into it can only be regarded as impotent.