نامي

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
نَامِي وَحُبِّي فِي فُؤَادِي صَاحِيوَالشَّوْقُ مُحْتَدِمٌ إِلَى الْإِصْبَاحِ
مَا لِلْمَشُوقِ بَوَاعِثٌ نَحْوَ الْكَرَىهُوَ فِي جَوَاهُ طَائِرٌ بِجَنَاحِ
مَا أَسْكَرَتْهُ الرَّاحُ لَكِنْ شَاقَهُحُسْنٌ بِوَجْهِكِ مُبْهِجُ الْأَوْضَاحِ
فَإِذَا أَرَادَ النَّوْمَ ظَلَّ بِطَيْفِهِيُغْرِي بِثَغْرٍ بَاسِمٍ وَضَّاحِ
فَيَظَلُّ يَرْنُو نَحْوَهُ مُتَرَقِّبًاشَمْسَ الصَّبَاحِ وَبَهْجَةَ الْأَرْوَاحِ
حَتَّى يَرَاهُ فِي الْحَقِيقَةِ مَاثِلًامُتَلَأْلِئًا مُتَوَهِّجَ الْأَفْرَاحِ

Sleep

  1. Sleep, while my love stays wide awake1 within my heart,
    and longing rages on until the morning light.
  2. The yearning lover has no call to look for sleep:
    in the burning fever of his love2 he is a bird in flight.
  3. It was not wine that made him drunk; what stirred his longing
    was the beauty of your face, whose radiance3 gladdens sight.
  4. So when he means to sleep, that beauty, through its phantom4,
    keeps luring him with a smiling mouth of gleaming white.
  5. And so he keeps on gazing towards it, waiting
    for the morning sun, and for the souls' delight,
  6. until he sees it standing there before him, real,
    shimmering, its joys aglow and bright5.

Notes

  1. Ṣāḥī means both 'awake' and 'sober'. The second sense prepares for verse 3, where the lover is drunk not on wine but on beauty: his love is sleepless and clear-headed, yet intoxicated. ↩
  2. Jawā is the inner burning of love and grief, a fever that consumes the lover from within. Being 'a bird in flight' (literally 'a bird with a wing') means he is restless, unable to settle into sleep. ↩
  3. Awḍāḥ are the gleaming, bright features of a face; the word shares its root with waḍḍāḥ, 'gleaming', used of the mouth in the next verse. ↩
  4. Ṭayf is the phantom of the beloved that visits the lover by night, a central motif of classical Arabic love poetry. Thaghr, 'mouth', properly means the front teeth, and waḍḍāḥ, 'gleaming', refers to their whiteness when she smiles. ↩
  5. The poem closes a circle. It opens with longing that lasts 'until the morning' (al-iṣbāḥ); the lover spends the night gazing at the phantom, waiting for 'the morning sun', and at dawn the beloved herself appears, so that she is the morning sun he was waiting for. ↩

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