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Le delizie del cuore, ovvero quel che non si trova in alcun libro

di Ahmad al-Tifashi

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Or What You Will Not Find In Any Book An anthology of stories, anecdotes and poems from the Arab Middle Ages. Expertly translated into English from the French version which was based on the original Arab manuscript. Witty, enlightening, and fascinating, the stories are remarkably 'modern' in their attitude towards gay sexuality.… (altro)
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Ahmad al-Tifashi was a 13th century Berber writer. Not much is known about him except that he was the compiler of this anthology (also known as A promenade of the hearts), a frequently-cited book on minerals, and a couple of medical texts.

The delight of hearts is a collection of medieval Arabic jokes, anecdotes and poems on the topic of sex, strung together and made to look respectable by suitable editorial comments and (pseudo-)scientific discussion from al-Tifashi. The respected French Arabist René Khawam produced the first complete translation of the text in 1971 (revised 1981); the English edition published in 1988 is a partial translation of the French text by the Canadian poet Edward Lacey. Logically enough, Gay Sunshine Press only paid Lacey to translate the bits about sex between men, which is about 60% of al-Tifashi's book. Obviously, anyone with a serious academic interest (or simply curious about the other 40%, which deals with topics like massage, flagellation, and anal sex with women) would do better to read it in French or Arabic.

In his introduction, al-Tifashi explains that his chief object is to entertain and amuse his readers. The Prophet himself is known to have indulged in jokes (although the examples al-Tifashi quotes don't seem very funny at this distance in time...), and there is plenty of evidence that laughing at life is a good thing. We shouldn't assume that he endorses any of the activities he writes about, or that they are safe and legal (much has changed in the world in 800 years, but not the porn industry's instinct for protecting itself with disclaimers!).

Actually, a surprising number of the anecdotes he recounts could fit into a comparable modern anthology given a few minor tweaks relating to types of clothing, means of transport, etc. Tales about sexual partners playing tricks on each other, being more or less well-endowed than expected, and so on, are surprisingly interchangeable. Other things are a bit more exotic - for instance, there's a whole chapter about incidents of "sleepwalking", penetrating someone (usually not the person you intend to) in their sleep, which only make sense in a culture where it's usual for groups of men to share a sleeping area, and where it's very dark at night.

Edward Lacey clearly does his best to preserve this light-hearted and subversive tone by using informal language in his translation, which sometimes gives rise to slightly odd transitions as we move from delicate quatrains about fish and gazelles to prose passages that read like an American 1980s hardcore porn paperback. And there are definitely some expressions that we could have done without - notably "dinge queens" (which he uses for men who like being penetrated by black slaves). I can't imagine that many people were still using that, even in 1988...

The translated poems, many of them by the 8th century poet Abu Nuwas, preserve rather more exotic atmosphere than the prose passages, but again Lacey isn't trying to outdo FitzGerald - he keeps the rhyme and metre quite loose most of the time.

An amusing and very sexy anthology, but I don't think it really tells us anything we didn't know about medieval Arab culture. Unless you have a very narrow view of the world, it will be no surprise to learn that men liked to fantasise about sex just as much 800 years ago as they do now, and that the number of imaginable permutations was not also so different from what it is now. Since we know that writing about beautiful boys became a fixed literary convention for later poets influenced by Abu Nuwas even if what they were thinking about were beautiful girls, or they were trying to describe religious ecstasies, we can't really take al-Tifashi as representative of the Arab world in the 13th century any more than we could draw conclusions about New York City in the 1970s from a reading of Larry Kramer.
You who wipe away my kiss
from your cheek,
fearing if your master saw it,
it would speak

and he'd punish you; if I'd
only known this
fear of yours, beautiful boy,
I'd have kissed away my kiss.
      (Abu Nuwas, translated by Lacey)
( )
1 vota thorold | Jan 13, 2018 |
So, The Delight of Hearts, or What You Will Not Find in Any Book by al-Tifashi is part of my long-neglected research pile, though fairly tangential to my main interests. It is a book from the late 11 c. or early 12 c. and pulls together many stories and anecdotes from earlier periods as well (at least to 8 c.). This edition is an English translation of part of the complete French translation of the original Arabic manuscript, published by Gay Sunshine Press.

What is this book, you ask? It's a compendium of stories, poems, jokes and other vignettes about notable homosexual members of the Baghdad court and the intelligentsia of medieval Islam. The complete original treatise also includes heterosexual material, but that was considered outside the interests and scope of this edition. Sadly, they left out the chapter on "spanking" or "beating" style massage, which is apparently still The translation tries to be true to the tone of the original, so there's a lot of crude language and some amazingly graphic material.

The introduction by the English translator was very useful in setting the context. It included a nice discussion of the evolution of Arabic poetic traditions and how to interpret some of the imagery and metaphors. It also connected gay sexual practices among the Muslim aristocracy to Greco-Roman and Persian traditions. The final chapter is an interview with a doctor who explains his theory on the cause of homosexuality and his prescriptions for curing it (depending on the age and experience of the patient). It's a very interesting look at medieval medicine and probably no worse than modern "cures."

I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, there's a certain amusement about such literature from historical eras given such homophobia in modern Islamic cultures (and Christian too, for that matter, but I don't think we're going to find any comparable medieval sex treatises by Christian authors, whereas I've seen multiple Islamic sources on the topic--of course, that could just reflect where I'm looking more than the availability of such materials). On the other hand, while al-Tifashi indicates that some gay men of his day preferred adult partners, the vast majority of the material revolves around sex with adolescents at best. Moreover, it also largely portrays highly exploitative encounters--the worst was the chapter on "stinging" or "sleepwalking": sexually molesting boys while they're asleep, though sometimes full-grown men are the inadvertent recipients of such attentions. But there's also boy prostitutes colluding with housebreakers to rob johns, older men using young slaves to lure young men into isolated places, and on and on. And this is probably largely a reflection of how vulnerable gays and bisexuals were (and still are) in a society where such orientations are officially prohibited.

So while I am sympathetic in concept, and some of the material is pretty funny, my modern sensibilities are disturbed at best and horrified at worst by much of the content because of the ages of most of the targets of these stories and the way that most of them are consummated. ( )
  justchris | Mar 19, 2010 |
An English translation of a French translation from the Arabic. This edition translates only the chapters with male homosexual themes (well, it is from the Gay Sunshine Press!).

The anthology's compiler, Ahmad al-Tifashi, lived from 1184 - 1254. However, many of the anecdotes and poems go back much further, some dating to the early days of Islam. Many refer to the 8th-century Irano-Iraqi poet, Abu-Nuwas. There is a decent introductory section, explicating some of the history and cultural issues necessary to an appreciation of the book.
  lilithcat | Oct 24, 2005 |
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Or What You Will Not Find In Any Book An anthology of stories, anecdotes and poems from the Arab Middle Ages. Expertly translated into English from the French version which was based on the original Arab manuscript. Witty, enlightening, and fascinating, the stories are remarkably 'modern' in their attitude towards gay sexuality.

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