Impostures (Library of Arabic Literature, 65)

Product Description
One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the YearWinner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation CategoryShortlist, 2021 National Translation AwardFinalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature CategoryFifty rogue’s tales translated fifty waysAn 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.
Review
"[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
"An astounding performance of literary skill...[A]n important translation of a criminally neglected work of world literature, and an impressive literary work in its own right." ―
Mada Masr
"It's absolutely delightful...pure pleasure to read." ―
LanguageHat.com
"A Herculean effort... Al-Hariri stands as a giant of Arabic literature. After reading Cooperson’s translation of
Impostures, the translator is worthy of similar praise." ―
Free Lance-Star
"To translate a work that has been called untranslatable for a thousand years requires more than just expertise in languages―it requires wit, creativity, and an ocean-deep reservoir of knowledge of history and literature and humanity. Michael Cooperson has all of that, plus the most essential, and rarest element: the courage to climb this Everest of world literature. The result isn’t just a translation―it’s a dazzling work of literary creation in its own right, with the linguistic gymnastics of
Pale Fire, the genre-switching of
Cloud Atlas, and the literary range of
2666." -- Peter Sagal, Host of NPR's Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!
"One might describe al-Ḥarīrī's twelfth-century Arabic classic as 'Melville's
Confidence-Man meets Queneau's
Exercices de style,' but in this remarkable Oulipean carnival of a translation by Michael Cooperson, there are so many other voices―and languages: Singlish, Spanglish, Shakespeare, middle management-speak, Harlem jive, the rogue's lexicon, Naijá...
Impostures is a wild romp through languages and literatures, places and times, that bears out and celebrates Borges's dictum: 'Erudition is the modern form of the fantastic.'" -- Esther Allen, translator of Zama, winner of the 2017 National Translation Award
"Both engrossing and entertaining to read." ―
Asian Review of Books
"Examples of Cooperson’s creativity and flair are endless, with a different dialect, technique or imitation used for each of the fifty
maqamat. This bold choice manages to show the elaborate nature of classical Arabic storytelling, but also of the English language. From Singlish to London slang, al-Hariri’s wa