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Dedication
- To you, my love: these poems of the love
that you have engraved1 upon the feelings of my heart; - the heart’s confidings through the nights weighed down
with passion’s ache, and all my deep wound would impart; - the stirrings of our love within my soul,
between my hopes and a despair that wanders in the dark; - and between all I long for in my love
and my wretched luck in passion, stumbling2 at every start: - these I have sent to you, my muse, the melodies
of a heart, from a lover with a poet’s art. - Some of them you heard from me, and some
I sent across the restless ether3 while we were apart; - and some I sang after the leave-taking
and the parting, to your phantom4 as it turned to depart. - To you, my wandering song, wherever you may be:
within my world, and deep within the hidden heart. - My poems are travellers, setting out from my heart;
but your love has not travelled: it does not depart. - If I have hurt some feeling of yours, forgive me;
and if they please you, that is glad news to my heart.
Notes
- Naqasha means to engrave, carve or inscribe, as in stone or wood: these poems of love are cut into the poet’s feelings as lasting inscriptions rather than passing words. The plural noun from the same root, nuqūsh (‘engravings’), is the name of the poet’s website. It is the beloved herself who did the engraving: the verb, naqashti, ‘you engraved’, is addressed to her. ↩
- Ḥaẓẓī al-ʿāthir, literally ‘my stumbling luck’, is the usual Arabic way of saying ‘my bad luck’: fortune is pictured as a walker who keeps tripping. The verse sets what the lover longs for against what his fortune actually brings him. ↩
- Al-athīr is the ether, the upper air, and in modern Arabic the medium through which radio and telephone signals travel; to send something ‘across the ether’ is to send it by broadcast or by telephone. The epithet al-thāʾir (‘turbulent, stirred up’) suggests both the crackle of long-distance lines and the agitation of the poet’s own feelings. ↩
- Ṭayf is the phantom of the beloved that visits the lover by night, a central motif of classical Arabic love poetry. Here the beloved herself has gone, and the poet sings to the image of her that remains with him and that is itself departing, fading as she moves further away. ↩
English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.