Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī was a well-educated Egyptian from the eleventh/seventeenth century, thought to originate from the town of Shirbīn, then a significant rural center in the eastern part of Delta. Little is known about him--including his social standing and profession--beyond Brains Confounded and two other extant texts: The Pearls (Al-Laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar) and The Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls (Ṭarḥ al-madar li-ḥall al-laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar).
Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded by Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, as well as editions and translations of al-Tūnisī’s In Darfur and al-Sanhūrī’s Risible Rhymes from the same era. In addition, he has compiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitled Al-ʿāmmiyyah al-miṣriyyah al-maktūbah: mukhtārāt min 1400 ilā 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009) and co-authored, with Lesley Lababidi, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo. He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. He is affiliated with the American University in Cairo.
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, poet, and photographer. His first novels to appear in English are The Crocodiles and The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, a literary experiment inspired by medieval Cairo historians, which won the 2015 Banipal Seif Ghobash Prize for Paul Starkey’s translation.
