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until he wiped it clean': 'shannaff', that he 'gurgled up the water in
the gurglet'; and 'iltaff', that he 'wrapped himself up in his own
garments unmindful of his wife's presence.
The seventh wife (TT) said: "My husband is a wrong-doer or weak and
foolish. All the defects are present in him. He may injure your head
or your body or may do both". In the ST, wrong-doing, weakness and
foolishness are expressed by a succession of three alliterative
hyperbolical adjectives. The multiplicity of alliteration, assonance,
and onomatopoeia, together with the hyperbolic associations with which
this succession of adjectives is invested, intensifies the emotive
impact of the expression. The subsequent sentence, however, extends
the previous meaning to almost an unthinkable magnitude. "All the
defects are in him". In the ST this meaning is expressed in a
peculiarly striking manner. A literal rendering of the Arabic sentence
would be: 'Every illness, for him, is an illness'. As it stands, the
sentence is ambiguous. It could be disambiguated if reference was made
to it in cliche form: 'Every illness has a cure'. The Arabic original
sentence would, consequently, mean: 'His defects breed more defects',
with the inevitable consequence that all defects imaginable are present
in him. His ruthless behaviour and aggressive attitude could be
seriously injurious. The recurrence of the 'k' sound in the last two
verbs, together with the double consonantal sound placed on the medial
letter of each verb, emphasises the action of ruthless, hurtful,
injurious and indiscriminate beating.
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