يذوي جمالك

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
فِي ضَجَّةِ النَّاسِ بَاتَ الشَّوْقُ يَعْزِلُنِيكَأَنَّنِي فِي بِلَادٍ مَا بِهَا أَحَدُ
حُرِمْتُ رُؤْيَةَ مَنْ أَهْوَى فَوَا أَسَفَامَنْ كَانَ بِالْأَمْسِ عِنْدِي كَيْفَ يَبْتَعِدُ؟
أَبْدَلْتِنِي ظُلْمَةً بَعْدَ الضِّيَاءِ وَلِيفِي عَتْمَةِ اللَّيْلِ شَوْقٌ فِيكِ يَتَّقِدُ
عُودِي إِلَى نَظَرِي يَشِعَّ حُسْنُكِ لِيفَمَا الْجَمَالُ سِوَى لِلْعَيْنِ يَحْتَشِدُ
إِنْ كَانَ حُسْنُكِ مَحْرُومًا عَلَى نَظَرِيفَكُلُّ مَا سَتَرَاهُ بَعْدَكُمْ رَمَدُ
يَذْوِي جَمَالُكِ إِنْ لَمْ تَرْوِهِ مُقَلِيفَأَرْتَوِي وَفُؤَادِي مِنْكِ يَبْتَرِدُ
لَا يُقْطَعُ الْغُصْنُ عَنْ جِذْعٍ بِهِ رَوِيَتْأُصُولُهُ وَلَهُ مِنْ مَائِهِ الْمَدَدُ

Your Beauty Withers

  1. Amid the clamour of people, longing has come to cut me off,
    as if I were in a land where there is no one.
  2. I am denied the sight of the one I love. Oh, the sorrow of it!1
    How can the one who yesterday was with me now be gone?
  3. You've given me darkness after light; and in the black
    of night I have a longing for you that burns on.
  4. Come back into my sight, and let your beauty shine for me,
    for beauty gathers for the eye, and for the eye alone.
  5. If your beauty is to be forbidden to my sight,
    then all that I will see, after you, is soreness2.
  6. Your beauty withers if my eyes do not water it3;
    so I drink my fill, and my heart is cooled by you.
  7. The branch is not cut off from the trunk through which its roots have drunk,
    and from whose water all its sustenance is drawn4.

Notes

  1. Wā asafā is the formula of the nudba, the Arabic lament that cries out to what is lost: 'Oh, alas for sorrow!' ↩
  2. Ramad is ophthalmia, the inflammation of the eyes caused, in Arabic love poetry, by weeping and sleepless nights. 'After you' is in the plural (baʿdakum), a plural of respect and tenderness for the beloved. ↩
  3. The image reverses the usual order: it is not her beauty that nourishes his eyes, but his gazing that 'waters' her beauty and keeps it alive, as water keeps a plant from wilting. In return he 'drinks' from her, and his heart is cooled. Beauty and the eye that sees it need each other. ↩
  4. The closing verse works like a proverb (tadhyīl) that sums up the argument: a branch is not cut off from the trunk that carries water to its roots. Madad is the supply that keeps something going. Following the previous verse, where his gaze 'waters' her beauty, the beloved's beauty is the branch and the lover is the trunk that feeds it, so by keeping away she cuts herself off from what sustains her. The image can also be read the other way round, with the lover as the branch who cannot live cut off from her. ↩

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