The Book of Rain

Translated by David Larsen

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• 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 Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī. In Larsen’s translation, Abū 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-tahtān, or “The Outpour,” a kind of continual rain, or al-waṭfā’, 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 years to come.

• The Book of Rain is not only accompanied by an expansive critical introduction by the translator, but a book’s worth of footnotes at the end, adding layering and nuance to the study of such an intriguing text more than a thousand years old....If you want to know a people, a culture, there’s no better way, one might say, than to approach from the foundation of language, and Larsen offers incredibly detailed insight into the context and reasons for differences both temporally and culturally far distant from most western understandings.
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