لا تفطميني عن هواك

Notes

1. To ‘pitch one’s tents’ in a place is the Bedouin image for settling there and making it home: the poet has taken up his dwelling in her heart. The wine drunk from her glance is a stock figure of Arabic love poetry: the beloved’s eyes intoxicate like wine. The verb adhmantu, ‘I became addicted’, makes the intoxication a lasting craving, not a single draught. The opening verses speak of her in the third person after the call ‘O you’, as Arabic does after yā man; from verse 3 she is addressed directly. ↩
2. Salsal is cool, sweet water that runs smoothly down the throat. ‘I drank, and thirsted still’ renders rawītu maʿa ẓamaʾī, literally ‘I was quenched along with my thirst’: love satisfies the craving and renews it in the same act. Aknāf, ‘sides, flanks’, is also used of the protective shelter someone extends to another. ↩
3. Lāta ḥīna, ‘it is no time for’, is a rare archaic construction known above all from the Qur’an (38:3), where it is said of past nations that cried out when ‘it was no time for escape’. The echo gives the child’s plea an old, solemn ring. The image of the whole passage is the lover as a nursing infant who cannot yet do without the breast of her love. ↩
4. Verses 4 and 5 are built in exact parallel: ‘Still I crawl / Still I sail’, ‘in love / through separation’, ‘my wet-nurses / my harbours’, ‘your lips / your eyes’, ‘I sip / I play’. The first pictures him as an infant fed by her lips; the second as a voyager through nawā, which means both separation and the far place one travels to, for whom her eyes are the harbours where he finds rest and from which his songs rise. ↩
5. Rawaytuhu means ‘I transmitted it’, as the rāwī, the reciter, learned a poet’s verses by heart and spread them. The verb has the same root as rawītu, ‘I quenched my thirst’, in verse 2, so the love she poured into him as drink he now pours out to others as poetry. ↩
6. Weaning is normally gradual: the child is separated from the breast little by little. Fiṣām is separation, a breaking apart; to be weaned ‘without any parting beforehand’ is to be cut off abruptly, with no preparation. The beloved’s desertion is thus pictured as a sudden weaning of the child of verse 3. ↩
7. Mann is to remind someone of a favour one has done him, which in Arabic ethics spoils the favour itself; true generosity forgives without reproach. The zimām is the halter or rein of a camel; ‘leading someone’s rein’ is a common figure for guiding him and managing his affairs. ↩
8. The question ‘Who?’ (man dhā) stands at the head of nine successive verses (10 to 18). Each is a rhetorical question that expects no answer: the answer is ‘no one but her’. The list moves from the healer of wounds and the guide in the desert to the one who smiles, nurses him in sickness, makes his bed and receives his guests, so that the beloved emerges as the whole of his life. Here the litany breaks off into the bare word, and tears take the place of the questions. ↩
9. The Arabic plays on a single root: al-buʿdu abʿada, literally ‘distance has put at a distance’ sleep from his eyes. The exclamation yā la-l-buʿdi, ‘oh, that distance!’, is a cry of pained astonishment, as one cries out at a calamity. ↩