Narrative
Impostures
مقامات الحريري
al-Hariri · 1110
Synopsis
In fifty sessions, the narrator al-Harith ibn Hammam recounts his encounters with Abu Zayd of Saruj, a learned and smooth-talking vagabond. In each town he finds him surrounded by a crowd that he moves with the tale of his misfortunes or dazzles with his verses, and then the swindler vanishes with the gifts he has collected.
Context
Al-Hariri took up the form of the maqama, invented a century earlier by al-Hamadhani, whose debt he acknowledges, but he himself fixed the written version of his sessions. In the thirteenth century, Yahya al-Wasiti copied and painted in Baghdad a copy now kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Arabic text was published in Paris in 1821 and 1822, edited by Silvestre de Sacy; René R. Khawam translated it into French in 1992, and Michael Cooperson into English in 2020.
Who it is for
To follow the ruses of a golden-tongued impostor, in one of the great books of classical Arabic prose.
Prizes and reception
Michael Cooperson received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2020, in the translation category, for his English version, Impostures.