This edition of Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq wa-l-niẓām fī ḥall shadharah min kalām ahl al-rīf al-ʿawāmm derives from an apparently unique manuscript preserved in Egypt’s National Library.3 The only ownership marks on the codex are the stamp of a waqf (religious endowment), indicating that it was once in the collection of the noted book collector and writer on language Aḥmad Taymūr Pasha (d. 1930) and the National Library’s accession mark. The manuscript consists of 39 folios and appears to have been repaired and rebound.4 The entire codex was probably copied by one person, using a largely legible Syro-Egyptian naskh. The text is almost entirely pointed and sometimes vocalized, especially in verse passages. An anomaly is the variation in the lineation: all pages (title and colophon pages aside) have eleven lines per page, except for two blocks that have twenty-one (2b–4a (4 pages) and 12b–13a (2 pages)); particularly strange is that folios 4, 12, and 13 have different numbers of lines on each side. Another anomaly is the occurrence of a blank folio (11), creating a lacuna in the text (see n. 44); the blank folio probably replaces one that was missing or damaged and was inserted when the codex was rebound.
There are occasional corrections, usually made in the margin. In one instance, however, on folio 24b, an entire line of verse has been crossed out and replaced, in a hand that may or may not be that of the original scribe, by two other lines, with further minor corrections made to the verses that immediately follow; in this edition, the replacing lines have been used (§3.5.1).5 On folio 27a (§3.9, §3.10), a passage of some 220 words, constituting two self-contained anecdotes, has been written, following a carat sign, in the margin, filling it entirely; subsequent trimming, no doubt during binding, has removed a portion of the text. The missing words have been recreated, in the case of §3.9, using Ibn Khallikān’s biography of al-Qāḍī l-Fāḍil (Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt, 3:161) and, in the case of §3.10, using al-Zamakhsharī’s Rabīʿ al-abrār (al-Zamakhsharī, Rabīʿ, 1:144).
There is no evidence that the manuscript is or is not a holograph.
In preparing the text, the orthography has been brought into conformity with modern practice (e.g., final hamzah has usually been added where omitted, e.g., iktifāʾ for iktifā), except where the rhyme requires that it be omitted (e.g., al-rā for al-rāʾ, to rhyme with muṣirrā) (§2.1.2). The original orthography has also been retained in passages of “rural” verse. Vocalization has been added for clarification and is not the copyist’s but the editor’s, based on the latter’s admittedly subjective idea of what the reader might find useful.
Asterisks are used, as in the original, to mark the ends of periods of rhymed prose, but are applied more consistently here than in the manuscript. Asterisks are also employed, as in the original, to set off the mnemonics used for meters (e.g., §2.4.2) but not, as there, to set off iterations of words or phrases from verses that are the subject of commentary, parentheses being used for that purpose. Other apparently random instances of asterisks in the manuscript have been ignored.
While English is the metalanguage of this series, in those sections of Risible Rhymes that consist of commentaries on texts (1 and 3), Arabic has been privileged, in the sense that the verses in question are reproduced in transliteration in the English text and precede (both when they first occur and in their further iterations within the commentary) their English translations. The reasons for doing so are set out in the Note on the Text to Brains Confounded (see Volume One, p. li).
One of the most conspicuous features of the text is the use of rhymed prose (sajʿ), which is pervasive in the passages written by the author, somewhat less so in the quotations from other writers. The translation attempts to include enough rhymes (or near rhymes or alliteration where full rhymes were not found) to signal its importance to the aesthetics of the text.