Licit Magic — GlobalLIT Working Papers 14. A Lion Walks into a Hammam…
Mollā Lüṭfī (d. 1495) on Majāz/Allegory
Written by Kristof D'hulster
A lion walks into a hammam and asks the stoker, “Any jobs going pal?” The stoker says, “No, sorry. Why don’t you try the circus?”
The lion looks at him and says, “Why should the circus be looking for a stoker?”
While it remains unclear whether Mollā Lüṭfī ever cracked a joke that began with “A lion walks into a hammam…” — I for one like to imagine that he did — what stands beyond doubt is that the 15th-century Ottoman polymath spent quite some time thinking on lions doing exactly such things… In his conclusion to a work on ʿilm al-maʿānī or “word order”, Mollā Lüṭfī offers a succinct apercu of the ʿilm al-bayān or “figures of speech”: tashbīh or “simile”, majāz or “allegory”, and kināya or “metonymy”. This working paper offers a full translation of Mollā Lüṭfī’s intricate discussion of the second of these figures of speech: the allegory. For this, the author gives two alternative overarching classifications: a linguistic vs. cognitive allegory classification and a metaphor vs. hypallage classification that is supplemented with three more ways of cognitive signification. Following a brief discussion of the various types of hypallage, the author then zooms in on the metaphor, by providing a perplexing array of alternative metaphor typologies:
· basic metaphor & metaphor of dependency
· explicit metaphor & implicit metaphor & imaginary metaphor & confirmatory metaphor
· absolute metaphor & enhanced metaphor & naked metaphor
· proverbializing metaphor
· metaphor of affectionate irony & metaphor of sarcastic irony.
If all goes well, by virtue of this translation, a lion walking into a hammam won’t hold any more secrets for you, be it a clawed lion, a lion marksman, a lion you raise in order to have it kill you, a lion wiggling its feet, a cowardly lion, a lion standing next to you, or a lion whose night stands in prayer…
To read the full paper, click here.
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