تكحلي بالعشق

ترجمة إنجليزية

فَتَكَحَّلِي بِالْعِشْقِ، رِمْشُكِ مَوْعِدِيوَسَنَاءُ وَجْهِكِ فِي اللَّيَالِي فَرْقَدِي

بِمَجَامِرِ السَّهَرِ الْمُفَتِّتِ عَنْبَرًافِي نَاهِدَيْكِ شَمَمْتُ عَاطِرَكِ النَّدِي

وَبِمُخْمَلِيِّ الصَّدْرِ أَسْمَعُ نَبْضَهُفَكَأَنَّهُ فِي الشَّوْقِ صَوْتُ تَنَهُّدِي

وَعَزَفْتُ لَحْنَ قَصِيدَتِي مِنْ وَقْعِهِوَخَتَمْتُ حَتَّى طَابَ ثَمَّ تَوَسُّدِي

بِرَفِيفِ خَصْرِكِ حِينَمَا دَاعَبْتُهُبِأَنَامِلِي، شَاهَدْتُ مَا لَمْ تَشْهَدِي

لَوْلَا أُنُوثَتُكِ الَّتِي طَوَّقْتُهَامَا كُنْتُ أَعْصِرُ خَمْرَ بَانِكِ بِالْيَدِ

Line Your Eyes with Love¹

Then line your eyes with love: your lashes are my tryst,
the radiance of your face, my Farqad² through the night.
By censers of the sleepless nights that crumble ambergris³,
I breathed your dewy fragrance at your breasts.
And on your velvet breast I hear its pulse,
as though it were, in longing, the sound of my own sigh.
And from its beat I played the music of my poem,
and closed it, till it grew sweet to pillow my head⁴ there and lie.
In the quiver of your waist, as my fingertips caressed it,
I witnessed what has never come within your sight.
But for your womanhood, which I encircled in my arms,
I'd not be pressing with my hand the wine of your willow bough⁵.

Kohl (kuḥl), the black powder traditionally used to line the eyes, deepens their darkness and brightness. The poet asks her to make love itself her kohl. The opening 'then' (fa-) makes the poem begin as if in the middle of a conversation, as the continuation of something already said. ↩
Al-farqad is one of the two bright stars of the Little Bear, the Farqadān, which circle close to the pole. Night travellers in the desert steered by them, and they became a byword for constancy and for guidance in the dark. ↩
The sleepless nights are pictured as censers in which ambergris, crumbled into grains, is slowly burnt. Their fragrance merges with the scent of her body. ↩
Tawassud is taking something as a pillow. After the music of her heartbeat has become his poem, he rests his head where he heard it. The word thamma, 'there', points back to her breast. ↩
Al-bān is the ben tree (moringa), whose tall, slender, supple branches are the classic image in Arabic poetry for the beloved's figure; it is often rendered 'willow'. 'Pressing the wine of your bān' compresses two images: her slender body is the bough, and the delight of holding her is its wine. Ṭawwaqtuhā, 'I encircled it', comes from ṭawq, a necklace or collar: his arms close around her like a ring. ↩

English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.