صباحك سكّر

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
صَبَاحُكِ سُكَّرٌ، وَشَذَاكِ رَنْدُوَعَيْشُكِ مُونِقُ الْأَكْنَافِ رَغْدُ
وَمَنْ يَهْوَاكِ مُكْتَئِبٌ حَزِينٌيُغَادِي قَلْبَهُ بَرْقٌ وَرَعْدُ
بِخَالِدِ حُبِّهِ يَضْنَى اشْتِيَاقًاوَلَا يَأْتِيهِ مِنْ عَيْنَيْكِ وَعْدُ
رَنَا لِجَمَالِكِ الْيَزْهُو اخْتِيَالًاكَرِئْمٍ مِنْ عَلِيِّ التَّلِّ يَعْدُو
وَأَنْتِ مَرَامُهُ فِي كُلِّ حِينٍوَأَيُّ هَوًى لِغَيْرِكِ فَهْوَ رَدُّ
هَفَا نَحْوَ الْجَمَالِ بِقَلْبِ صَادٍوَصَادِي الْحُبِّ لَا يُرْوِيهِ وِرْدُ
وَلَوْ أَذِنَتْ لَمَا كَانَتْ حُدُودٌلِتَمْنَعَهُ، وَلَا أَشْقَاهُ سَدُّ

Your Morning Is Sugar1

  1. Your morning’s sugar, and your fragrance rand2;
    your life is lush and easy, pleasant far and wide.
  2. But he who loves you is downcast and grieving:
    morning after morning, lightning, thunder storm his heart.
  3. In his undying love he wastes away with longing,
    and not one promise ever reaches him from your eyes.
  4. He gazed upon your beauty, strutting in its pride,
    like a white gazelle3 that bounds down from the hill’s high side.
  5. You are his aim at every hour, and any love
    for someone else but you is turned away, denied.
  6. He yearned toward beauty with a thirsting heart,
    and one who thirsts for love no spring has ever satisfied.
  7. Were she to give him leave4, no bounds would hold him back,
    and no barrier would bring him misery.

Notes

  1. Ṣabāḥik sukkar, ‘your morning is sugar’, is a common Levantine and Egyptian morning greeting: may your morning be sweet. The poem opens with it and then sets the beloved’s sweet, easy mornings against the lover’s stormy ones: yughādī, ‘comes at him in the morning’, makes the lightning and thunder his daily dawn. ↩
  2. Rand is a fragrant tree of the Arabian desert, often identified with the bay laurel, whose scent is praised in classical poetry. ↩
  3. Kariʾm, ‘like a riʾm’: the riʾm is the pure white gazelle, an image of grace and beauty in classical Arabic poetry. The beloved’s beauty, proud and quick, is pictured as such a gazelle bounding down from the top of the hill (min ʿaliyyi al-tall). ↩
  4. The poem turns here from addressing the beloved (‘you’) to speaking of her (‘she’), a shift of person (iltifāt) common in Arabic poetry, as if the lover now speaks to himself. ↩

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