صبح الهوى

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
صُبْحُ الْهَوَى، وَالشَّوْقُ أَعْيَاهُ النَّوَىوَالْقَلْبُ مُلْتَاعٌ بِأَوْجَاعِ الْجَوَى
مَاذَا يَضِيرُكِ لَوْ سَخَوْتِ بِطَلَّةٍكَالشَّمْسِ فِي صُبْحِ الْمُحِبِّ وَقَدْ ذَوَى
فَلَقَدْ بَرَاهُ الْوَجْدُ فِيكِ وَشَفَّهُوَبِنَارِ عِشْقِكِ فِي الْفُؤَادِ قَدِ اكْتَوَى
لَكِنَّهُ مُتَمَسِّكٌ بِعَذَابِهِوَلَوَ انَّ فِيهِ فَنَاءَهُ بِكِ مَا ارْعَوَى
وَلَقَدْ أَمَضَّ بِهِ الْأُوَامُ وَحَرُّهُوَلَوَ أَنَّهُ سُقِيَ الْفُرَاتَ لَمَا ارْتَوَى
لَنْ يَرْتَوِي إِلَّا بِرَشْفِ رُضَابِكُمْهَلَّا أَنَلْتِ فُؤَادَهُ مَا قَدْ نَوَى
لَنْ يَرْتَوِي إِلَّا بِحِضْنِكِ صَدْرُهُهَلَّا حَوَاهُ الصَّدْرُ فِيمَا قَدْ حَوَى

Love’s Dawn

  1. Love’s dawn: and longing, worn out by distance1,
    and the heart in anguish, racked by passion’s fevered woe.
  2. What harm would it do you, to be generous with one glimpse,
    like the sun, upon the morning of a lover wilting low2?
  3. For passion for you has worn him thin and wasted him,
    and in his heart he has been branded by your love’s fire.
  4. And yet he clings to his torment; though it held
    his own annihilation in you3, he would not let it go.
  5. Burning thirst and its heat have pained him sorely:
    he’d not be quenched, though he drank the whole Euphrates’4 flow.
  6. He will not be quenched but by sipping your lips’ nectar:
    will you not grant his heart what it has set itself upon1?
  7. His breast will not be quenched except by your embrace:
    will your breast not enfold him, among all it enfolds?

Notes

  1. Al-nawā in verse 1 means ‘distance, separation’; nawā in verse 6 means ‘he intended, set his heart on’. The two words are identical in sound and spelling (jinās tāmm) and both fall at the rhyme, so what the heart ‘intends’ answers the ‘distance’ that exhausts it. ↩
  2. Dhawā is used of a plant that withers for lack of water and light. The beloved’s glimpse, ‘like the sun’, is what the wilting lover needs to revive. ↩
  3. Fanāʾuhu bika, ‘his passing away through you’, may recall fanāʾ, the Sufi term for the annihilation of the self in the Beloved. The lover would accept even that rather than give up his suffering. ↩
  4. The Euphrates is proverbial in Arabic for sweet, abundant water; al-furāt as a common noun also means ‘the sweetest water’. All of it would not quench a thirst that only the beloved can relieve. ↩

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