I don't have the knowledge to judge the accuracy or adeptness of the translation, but the stories in this work of picaresque adventures are something of a delight to read, and cleverly wrought in a variety of linguistic modes. The contextualizing content about the translation choices and research is all fascinating, too, for those with interest in the topic. It makes for a stylistic kaleidoscope, in a way that I suspect indicates a masterful translation, even if I can't judge it against the original. I found it more enjoyable to take it in small sips, a story at a time, rather than downing big gulps of it at once.

Thank you to NetGalley and NYU Press for a digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

I feel like I stumbled upon treasure with this book as it was a totally unknown collection of stories to me. I love reading folk tales and fables from other countries and cultures and thanks to this modern translation I was able to discover Impostures, and what a fortune that was!! Thinking about this being written centuries ago is amazing.
I can't really comment on the merits of this version compared to any others as I only know this but the writing feels very natural and not awkward. Clearly a lot of thought and effort went into it.

This is a masterpiece of Arabic literature translated into English - translation was good. I would have preferred (as I do all translated texts) a bilingual edition. Recommended.

This was very interesting and something I had no knowledge of previously! Very in depth analysis alongside the text which gives you even more from the tales. Recommend for lovers of cultures.

I haven't read the original, but this English translation was a treat. Fascinating storytelling with clever wordplay and dialogue.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with this book in exchange for my honest opinion. This is available for purchase now.

When I read the description of Impostures, I immediately thought of a comedic play and I think that colored my expectations a little. It was far from what I expected, and I feel very lucky to have read this enthralling book.

One of the fascinating things about this book is the number of styles translator Michael Cooperson uses: from Shakespeare to Twain, and everything in between. It was so very cool! I don’t know anything about the original text, aside from what is spoken of in the introduction, so I don’t know how closely Cooperson stuck to the original, but I could tell he put a lot of effort into keeping the spirit of it, so to speak.

It did take me a while to get through this book. It’s what I call a “smart read,” meaning it was difficult for me to focus on it during the noisy parts of my day (I have a toddler tornado). Much of what made this an intriguing read was the brilliant way language was used throughout.

Readers who like the feel of language as much as the dialogue in a story will like this book. There’s something about it that feels very special. I’m struggling to put what I mean into words, but it’s more than just a collection of stories. It’s incredibly unique and I wish I could have read this with other (smarter-than-me) people, just to have the opportunity to discuss its nuances.

This is one of those books that I’m glad I read, but will probably not read again. Some books are like that. I fully enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone who likes to stretch their reading muscles and try something different.

This is truly amazing translation in scope and execution. (I can only assume the original is superb, too, since I don't speak Arabic.) I had never even heard of this book when I saw it available on NetGalley, but I wanted to increase my exposure to Arab literature. When I read that the translator did every "story" (imposture) in a different English dialect or style, I knew I had to request it. Could he possibly pull it off?

Yes, I think he did. He states right up front that he's not aiming for a literal translation, because that's been done before (and not, in his opinion, to good effect). The sections are divided roughly in three: those translated to imitate a particular author's style (such as Chaucer), those done in different global dialects of English, and those done in a specialized jargon (such as legalese). That's a tall order, especially since no one person is likely to have mastery of all the styles and dialects involved. In my opinion, though, the translator has done an absolutely superb job with it. Whenever he uses a dialect that isn't his own, he has had at least one native speaker of that dialect proofread and correct it for him, so we can hope there isn't any sloppy faux dialect here.

I'm left feeling that the original must be a rich, varied text, and I'm lucky to have been introduced to it in translation. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for classics of Arabic literature, but also for people who love experimenting with style and language.

A heads up, the review is too long for GR. Full version here: https://creativegretelslebkuchenhaus.art.blog/2020/06/11/review-the-impostures-maqamat/
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I received a review copy from the publisher via Netgalley. Thank you for this unique opportunity!

As some might already know, my expertise is East Asian art history/history, museums and postcolonialism. I always strive to read beyond my expertise to gain new knowledge, learn about cultures and study unfamiliar topics because learning is important, a privilege and fun.
So, when I saw this book, I immediately had to download it.

The Impostures is an old collection of poems written by al-Ḥarīrī, an Arab poet who lived during the late 11th and early 12th century. The poems are called maqamatt and are a performance of poetic virtuosity where a speaker stands (or sits) in front of an audience and create an impromptu poem that plays with Arabic. The book begins by explaining what maqamatts are, tracing the ambiguous and contradicting meanings.
Maqamatt can be described as:

"The meaning of the word Makamat is derived from "a place where one stands upright" and hence the place where one is at any time. Next it is used metonymically to denote "the persons assembled at any place" and finally, by another translation, "the discourses delivered or conversations held in any such assembly". This metaphorical use of the word Makamat has however been restricted to discourse and conversations like those narrated by Hariri and his predecessor Al Hamadani, which are composed in a highly finished style, and solely for the purpose of exhibiting specimens of various kinds of eloquence, and exemplifying rules of grammar, rhetoric and poetry." (The Assemblies of Al-Hariri: Fifty Encounters with the Shaykh Abu Zayd of Seruj, trans. by Amina Shah (London: Octagon, 1980), p. viii.)

After explaining the meaning of maqamatt and it’s cultural and socio-political context, the book goes on explaining al-Ḥarīrī’s biography, including his “predecessor” Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadani (969–1008), who supposedly invented the genre.
Al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqamatt is special because he writes the poems as a continuous story, telling the life and adventures of a linguistically skilled trickster, Abu Zayd from Saruj, from the perspective of a sort of friend. Abu Zayd dons various costumes and identities and is a beggar poet, something that is considered a lifestyle and genre in and of itself. And, as said before, even though Abu Zayd is the protagonist of the story, the poems are told from another perspective: al-Harith is telling the story and passing of the oratory and literary skills of Abu Zayd and, until the end, the narrator is tricked by Abu Zayd’s costumes.
What makes this so intriguing is not only the fact that Abu Zayd is shown to be a masterful literati able to create godlike (and I do mean in the religious and spiritual way as Arabic was seen as Allah’s language) poems but also in the fact that al-Ḥarīrī’s skills were so great and versatile that people found proof that he might have cheated himself. It is entirely possible that al-Ḥarīrī stole some (or all) poems from an African traveller that visited the Middle East. Because the styles of the poems vary so greatly, it is entirely possible that al-Ḥarīrī didn’t work alone on this project but there’s no real way of proving this over a millennia later. An he wouldn’t have confessed his theft or collaboration anyway so ultimately, it’s up to a multitude of interpretations.
Abu Zayd’s story ends interestingly: after having swindled, stolen, lied and tricked, he tries to perform one big show in a mosque, asking a gathering of faithfuls to pray for him while he confesses his misdeeds. And to the surprise of the narrator – and probably Abu Zayd himself – the prayers worked. His wandering life ends and he becomes an ascetic who only recites sermons and therefore uses Arabic as it is intended: to disperse God’s words. Leaving behind his life as a vagabond and trickster also means that he must stop using language for artistic purposes.

All of this is just in the foreword. After the acknowledgements comes the introduction, which talks about the al-Hamadhani’s and al-Ḥarīrī’s lives, the production of the Maqamatt (which can also be translated as “Impostures”, hence the title) and detailing the content and style of the poems, including Arabic and Western interpretation of the Maqamatt. I won’t repeat everything because it is A LOT of material and history but suffice to say that quite a lot of Westerners did see the linguistic virtuosity as decadent and unnecessary, that no true poet would need such silly tricks. This Orientalist and Eurocentric mindset is, of course, absolute horseshit (and I’d reckon to a large degree envy of not having the skills to use language in such a monumental way).

Instead of trying to explain what kind of linguistic tricks the Maqamat offers, I’ll let the introduction takes this from my hands:

"Most famously, al-Ḥarīrī made a point of including examples of the kinds of trick writing that his predecessor had claimed to be able to produce. In Imposture 28, the roguish Abū Zayd delivers a sermon in which every word consists entirely of undotted letters (excluding, that is, half the letters in the Arabic alphabet). In Imposture 6, he dictates a letter in which every second word contains only dotted letters and the remaining words only undotted ones. In Impostures 8, 35, 43, and 44, he composes a story or poem that seems to be about one thing but contains so many words with double meanings that it can be read as telling an equally coherent story about something else. In Imposture 16, he extemporizes several palindromes (sentences that read the same backward as forward). In Imposture 17, he delivers a sermon that can be read word by word from the end to produce an equally plausible speech. In 32, he produces ninety legal riddles, each based on a pun. And in Imposture 46, he trains schoolchildren to perform feats such as taking all the words that contain the rare letter ẓāʾ and putting them into a poem. To some critics, manipulations like these have seemed an embarrassing waste of time, and evidence of the decadence of “Oriental taste.” 2 To my mind, however, they lie at the heart of al-Ḥarīrī’s enterprise."

You don’t have to know a lot about Arabic to see what artistry the maqamat represents. I read this passage and was already awed. Of course, the artistry is also “faked”, in a sense, since the actual maqamat would be a live performance but al-Ḥarīrī doesn’t perform this live – in fact, the book tells one story where he failed a prompt from the audience so miserably that he escaped and months later produced these incredible written maqamat, which is one reason why people believe he might have stolen the poems – he writes them down and makes them perform “live” within his story by Abu Zayd. There is a certain artificiality to this supposed live performance but I think that it doesn’t take away from the skills. Some things are just do difficult to come up on the spot and, as probably everybody knows, to be good and improvised speaking (poetry, speech or otherwise) requires immense training, dedication, practice and skill.

After the introductions comes a Note on the Translation which takes up several pages and…is really interesting to read. I also studied comparative literature so the process of translating, its theory and problems, is nothing new to me. In this section, the translator explains the history of Maqamat translations, explaining the age old question: do you translate faithfully word by word or do you translate faithfully by meaning and style? Poetry is particularly hard to translate because it rhymes, it has a rhythm, puns, word plays, palindromes and many other linguistic tricks and styles that can’t be translated 1:1. As a translator you are naturally restricted by the rules from the language you are translating to. You can’t just copy an idiom and call it a day.
The translator, Cooperson, recollects the history of European translations of the Maqamat, showing how some opted to translate the poems verbatim because they didn’t want to “pollute” the poems and some because they only saw merit in the poems for its use to teach Arabic and not for its literary quality. In fact, some argued that the poems had no value, as mentioned above, because it was to ornamental, pompous, flowery, gaudy or whatever other negatively connoted adjective. Some actually only saw the usefulness of the text to study Arabic grammar and vocabulary.
Cooperson also talks about other translations and argues that those that took the most liberty and actually tried to copy the playfulness of the poems by departing in style and content were essentially the most faithful, successful and interesting. He particularly mentions the Russian translations by Anna Arkadievna Iskoz-Dolinina, Valentin Michaelovich Borisov and Valeria Kirpichenko, all published at different times but using Russian the best way possible to translate the style of the maqamat. He also says that German and Hebrew translations seem to have been the most successful because they were the most creative and those that stayed very close to the text – translating almost word by word and thus creative prose instead of poetry – were the least successful because they didn’t elicit the same reaction in readers.

Cooperson notes:

"Minimally, this means translating the verse as verse , and finding equivalents for the puns, riddles, and palindromes. Admittedly, such equivalents rarely have the same lexical meaning as their originals. But the lexical meaning, in these cases, is not the point. In Imposture 16, for example , al-Ḥārith is amazed that Abū Zayd can produce spontaneous palindromes; what they mean is barely relevant. That is why a translation like “Won ton? Not now!” (§16.5) works perfectly well even though the original says something else (which happens to be almost
equally nonsensical). Similarly, the alternation of dotted and undotted letters in §6.6 can be imitated by alternating words of French and words of Germanic origin. Fortunately, there are enough of both in English that the translation can say reasonably close to the lexical meaning of the original."

How indeed does one translate the Maqamat into English?
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The rest of the review can be found on my blog. Link is above.

I really wanted to get further into the book but could not finish it because the e-document sent kept malfunctioning no matter the platform, nonetheless I'm interesting in purchasing the physical copy once I get a chance

I found it difficult to get into this book, so I didn't read much. I found the writing beautiful, and I think the translation was expertly done, but I found the series of stories a bit repetitive. I think this is a book you need to savour, and unfortunately I haven't had the motivation for this kind of book since the pandemic started. I give it two stars, not because it's bad, but because I didn't read enough of it to give it more.

For students and scholars of Arabic literature or translated works, this one is a real find. The translator’s note, the introduction, the notes, and the bibliography are incredible research material in their own rights. The work itself is not widely known but gives such insight into various aspects of the literary and cultural landscapes that it should be housed in academic libraries across the country.

I love Middle East stories set in the Middle Age and this was excellent.
Great characters, great storytelling and a fascinating background.
I was hooked since the beginning and I found it engrossing and fascinating.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Impostures is based on the Maqamat written by the Basran poet al-Hariri in the 11th Century. The book is a series of 50 anecdotes about a wandering conman called Abu Zayd, who ekes out a living through cunning and his mastery of language.

The stories are a bit formulaic and repetitive, but that is not the point. What this is about is the word games that Abu Zayd plays, and the cleverness of the prose. For example, in the original Arabic, there is a palindrome that occupies an entire paragraph, a letter that can be read forwards or backwards, and verse where the words alternate between having dots in them and not having dots.

This wordplay presents great challenges to a translator, and Cooperson really delivers a masterclass in translation and adaptation. Each story is rendered in a different English narrative style, depending on the subject matter. We get Chaucer, Dickens, Wodehouse, Twain, Defoe, Doyle, Fielding, Boswell and copious other writers used as models for translation, and also translations using Singlish, Spanglish and Strine, as well as slang used by '20s era diners and Western cowboys. Cooperson also solves the challenges of things like the dots and no-dots by posing similar challenges in English.

This is a book to dip into rather than read right through, as there is no real plot thread running through the 50 impostures. Fans of riddles, wordplay and slang should find plenty to enjoy here.

Excellent book. I love a good con. And this book delivers. I read it was translated from Arabic to English, which must have been very difficult but great job.

This book follows a middle Eastern man around the Mideast. Very clever, he is a con man and takes on different roles to con people. An excellent and clever wordsmith, and the descriptions of the places and different adventures he goes on is unbelievably great! I gave it 4 stars for its unique and just a downright great read! 4 stars! Again!

Special thanks to NYU press and NetGalley for my ARC copy.

Thank you NetGalley and NYU Press for an ARC of this book for an honest review.

This book went beyond the scope of my literary comprehension, hence my failure to finish reading and give it a proper rating. I think perhaps it has a particular audience familiar with the author and the legends/tales which have been given a scholarly academic translation with multiple footnotes and explanations.

Based on the publisher's description, I expected (and wished it had been) a "lighter read', something along the lines of One Thousand and One Nights (see below, part of the publisher's description):

"Fifty rogue’s tales translated fifty ways....An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries...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...".

Sounds amazing. If there are Middle School through YA versions available (in English), I would be interested in reading these tales. Unfortunately, even while skipping over the lengthy scholarly explanations and references in this book, I was not entertained by the tales.

Thank you to NetGalley and NYU Press for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available May 5th 2020

There are many ways to describe Michael Cooperson's transliteration of al-Hariri's The Impostures, but boring is not one of them. Al-Hariri of Basra, as Cooperson explains in his introduction, is a well known ancient Arabic poet who is best known for 'maqamat', a literary device in which a collection of stories is told through different forms such as poetry, prose and play-writing. With creative jurisprudence, Cooperson imitate each of these bawdy tales in the styles of iconic Western playwrights, poets and songwriters such as Virginia Woolf. Before each story, Cooperson includes a brief overview of the story and his reasoning for choosing the particular style. As a reader, I was wildly entertained. While each 'imposture' or story was only a few pages, they reminded me of a lot of older literature similar to Don Quixote, Don Juan or even the ancient Greek plays. Even if this is an academic text, it is really easy to read and follow along. Cooperson does an admirable job of making al-Hariri known and palatable to the Western audience. The question is - should he? Should the work of a respected Arabic author be transliterated or should the Western audience reach beyond their vaulted cannon and explore new cultural identities? As a reader, this is the unsettling conundrum I am left with.

Though worthwhile, this is dense and poorly formatted, making it nearly impossible to read on a smart device.

What a wild ride! Impostures by al-Hariri tells the adventures of Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī as he travels through the medieval Middle East. In a series of echoing stories, readers learn that he is a linguistically brilliant trickster. This fact makes translation a difficult thing: how does one transform extensive wordplay in one language to another? Translator Michael Cooperson performs literary pyrotechnics as he turns ancient Arabic wordplay into English stories that convey the same kind of literary gymnastics. Cooperson chooses to use dozens of different literary styles—from Geoffrey Chaucer to Mark Twain, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, as well as a whole array of global accents. The book is absolutely fascinating—but the reader must be aware that at heart it is an intellectual puzzle rather than a collection of simple folk tales.

My review of "Impostures" by al-Ḥarīrī is based solely on this translation, and I feel like such an experimental and original undertaking in translating a book written nine centuries ago according to a vastly different literary tradition deserves its own review in addition to the book.

Impostures is a collection of 50 encounters
with Abū Zayd, a con-man with so many tricks up his sleeve, but in the end, his genius and cunning boil down to his mastery of language. In addition the frame narrative makes the reader experience the sense of incredulity anyone would be expected to feel after hearing Abū Zayd's adventures.

At first I was a bit hesitant about the translation because of the idea of English voices being used for an Arabic work of literature did not sit well with me, but as I read I saw it was not in an effort to make it just easier or culturally closer. Deciding on what author's voice or specific variety of English is going to be adapted requires an excellent mastery of such a complex, ever transformative source material!

From the reader's perspective, it is not any easier to read just because English narrative examples are followed, in fact, it's quite the opposite especially for the chapters (?)/impostures that use regional dialects or sociolects of English. But I think it's quite enjoyable if you are not in a rush to finish it quickly.

This is a very clever book but at times complex. In reading it I wished I was reading it as part of a class, rather than alone, so I could discuss it with others and fully understand the narrative and stylistic choices.