One thing that annoys me in reading Durrell is the invariable insertion of u after q even when the q represents Arabic qāf. This is not unique to him—it exists in many books written about the Middle East before, say, the ’60s—but he’s particularly thoroughgoing about it; for instance, the OED entry for qasida ‘an Arabic or Persian panegyric or elegiac poem or ode’ has a bunch of citations, ranging from 1819 to 1971, but only one with the qu- spelling:
1958 L. DURRELL Balthazar iv. 82 He was delighted to hear some music and listened with emotion to the wild quasidas that the old man sang.
Another example from Balthazar (on the penultimate page, p. 242 of my Dutton edition): “I was terribly upset when Balthazar told me that he had fallen down those stairs at the central Quism and killed himself” (qism ‘part, section’ being an Egyptian term for a police station). I simply don’t understand the rationale. If you want to provide a folksy anglicized version, why not use k? The vast majority of your readers won’t know the difference between Arabic qāf and kāf, and wouldn’t be able to pronounce the qāf correctly anyway, so why not write “kasida” and “kism”? If you want to be scientific and use the q, why on earth toss in that pointless u, which adds only the certainty of mispronunciation?
While I’m at it, there’s an interesting word in a description of the Alexandria harbor in the first chapter of Clea (yes, I’ve reached the last book of the Quartet; the quote is from p. 34 of the Dutton edition): “Framed by the coloured domes there lay feluccas and lateen-rig giassas, wine-caiques, schooners, and brigantines of every shape and size, from all over the Levant.” When I couldn’t find giassa in the OED or Webster’s Third International, I started to worry, but the internet came through again—the Project Gutenberg text of R. Talbot Kelly’s Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt (1916) contains this very illuminating sentence: “These native boats are of several kinds, from the small ‘felucca,’ or open boat used for ferry or pleasure purposes, to the large ‘giassa,’ or cargo boat of the river.” But it will surprise no one to learn that I’m still curious about the word itself. It looks Italian, but it’s not in the Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana or my own dictionaries; it looks like it should be pronounced /jasa/, but Egyptian Arabic does not use the /j/ sound. Any information will be much appreciated.