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The Book of Rain
Brief Description
Named a Best Book of 2025 by Books Without Borders A vivid translation of Ab Zayd al-Anr's early Arabic weather lexicon, Book of Rain reveals a richly detailed linguistic landscape devoted to the many forms of rain. The contents of the future are the contents of...
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The Book of Rain
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Description
Named a Best Book of 2025 by Books Without Borders
A vivid translation of Ab Zayd al-Anr's early Arabic weather lexicon, Book of Rain reveals a richly detailed linguistic landscape devoted to the many forms of rain.
The contents of the future are the contents of a cloud.
So begins translator David Larsen's introduction for the Book of Rain, the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words, by early Arabic linguist Ab Zayd al-Anr. In Larsen's translation, Ab Zayd's lexicography of rain is simultaneously an academic, archival, and poetic pursuit.
After the fashion of Larsen's award-winning translation of Names of the Lion, these rich, extensive lists provide detailed descriptions of specific kinds of rainfall, including al-tahtn, or "The Outpour," a kind of continual rain, or al-waf', or "The Beetle-Brow" which is a "briskly-flowing rain that is counted among the continual rains, whether it is of long or short falling." Here, we are provided language for frosts, dews, thunder, lightning, clouds, and, of course, the various and plentiful words for waters. Coupled with Larsen's introduction, the Book of Rain is a source of endless interdisciplinary inquiry which will continue to fascinate readers for centuries to come.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9798891060364
Publisher: Wave Books
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 20 November 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: Wave Books
Illustration: Illustrations
Contributors:
- Translated by David Larsen
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 177.0mm
Height: 247.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 200
About the Author
David Larsen is a U.S. poet and translator of classical Arabic texts. His translation of Ibn Khlawayh's Names of the Lion (Wave Books) received the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. A former fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature, he is at work on a bilingual edition of the poems of Jaml Buthaynah. David Larsen lives in New York City.
Ab Zayd al-Anr was a lexicographer and grammarian of the Arabic language who lived and worked in Basra, Iraq. A lifelong bachelor, his ascetic lifestyle was softened by a jovial demeanor. There was in his day no scholar of note who did not study under him, or under whom he did not study, and he conducted his own fieldwork, interviewing speakers of select tribal dialects in their Central Arabian redoubts. He was not, per se, a writer, but a teacher whose lectures on linguistic matters were much sought out and copied down as books by later generations of students. Of some forty recorded titles, six by Ab Zayd have survived to the present day; and of these, his Book of Rain is the first to be translated into any language. Ab Zayd died in Basra circa 830 CE, at the age of ninety-five.
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