استمع إلى القصيدة
خُلِقْتِ فِي الْحُسْنِ وَحْدَكِفَمَا لِحُسْنِكِ ثَانِي!
كَأَنَّمَا أَنْتِ أُنْثَىحَوَتْ جَمِيعَ الْمَعَانِي!
وَقَدْ صَفَا لَكِ وُدِّيعَلَى مَدَارِ الزَّمَانِ
أَلَيْسَ يَكْفِيكِ أَنِّيهَجَرْتُ كُلَّ الْغَوَانِي
لِأَجْلِ عَيْنَيْكِ أَحْيَافِدَى الْعُيُونِ عِيَانِي!
فِدًى لِحُسْنِكِ نَفْسِيوَمُهْجَتِي وَكِيَانِي
يَا مُبْتَغَى الْقَلْبِ قَلْبِيلِبُعْدِ دَارٍ يُعَانِي
أَلَيْسَ فِي الْقَلْبِ دَارٌلَمْ تَدْرِ بُعْدَ الْمَكَانِ
Your Beauty Has No Second
- You were created, in beauty, alone:
your beauty has no second of its kind! - It is as though you were a woman
in whom all meanings1 are combined! - My love for you has stayed pure
as all the turning years unwind. - Is it not enough for you that I
have left all other beauties2 behind? - For the sake of your eyes I live:
may my own sight be ransom3 for those eyes! - May my soul be ransom for your beauty,
and my heart, and all my being! - O my heart’s desire, my heart
is suffering, your home so far away. - Is there not a home within the heart
that knows nothing of distance or of place?4
Notes
- Maʿānī means ‘meanings’, and also fine qualities and virtues: she sums up in herself everything that beauty and goodness can signify. ↩
- Ghawānī (singular ghāniya) are beautiful women, so called, the lexicographers say, because their beauty makes them independent (ghaniyya) of adornment. ↩
- Fidā, ‘ransom’, is the Arabic formula of devotion: ‘may I be your ransom’, that is, may I suffer in your place. ʿIyānī, ‘my sight’, chimes with ʿuyūn, ‘eyes’: he would give his own eyes for hers. ↩
- Dār, ‘home’, and lam tadri, ‘it has not known’, echo each other in sound, and buʿd, ‘distance’, returns from verse 7. The distant home of verse 7 is answered by a nearer one, a home in his heart that knows nothing of distance: she already lives there, however far away her own home may be. ↩
English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.