ماذا دهاك

What Has Come Over You?

1. What has come over you? You once were like a flower
   that gave us scent and nectar, heady with delight¹,
2. and like a nightingale that trilled the songs of love
   full-throated, thrilling lover and beloved alike;
3. or like the morning, when its light has wiped the dark away,
   and proudly in the sky the rising sun shines bright;
4. and like a bud that pines away with a young girl’s longing,
   whose dream of opening has only sharpened her desire;
5. and like a grove whose splendour spring has made more splendid still,
   whose loveliness God ordered, setting every feature right,
6. a grove alive with song², set trembling by the warbling of its birds,
   as they struck up their music in a clear and limpid strain;
7. and like a breeze that wandered over love’s thicket before dawn,
   until its branches clapped their hands with all their might.
8. What has come over you, that you are angry now in love,
   no longer smiling, turning your companion³ from your sight?
9. Along the path of ardent love, his love had been
   a light that lit the road before your feet.
10. His footsteps sketched along its landmarks radiant visions
    that shone with splendour and with glinting light.
11. You two were once the wine-cup and its bubbles:
    no one could ever part the two, try as they might.
12. You poured each other love to drink in an embrace,
    an arm that wound around a slender form and held it tight.
13. You two could never drink your fill of love’s first wine⁴,
    as sweet as wine that’s savoured at the fall of night.
14. And you two sang, till nothing in creation could be seen
    but love, enfolding in its arms a lover and his love.
15. What has come over you? Is this, I wonder, anger,
    or joy that you have painted over⁵, artfully, in anger’s guise?
16. Yet I lay no blame on you: in the anger of beauty
    I have watched⁶ the lightning flash, again and again,
17. and in it I have seen a joy that far exceeds
    the gladness of contentment, however sure that may be.
18. Did you learn that ‘sulking’ (1) is an art in love,
    and wish to try it out, to set a fiercer fire alight?
19. I will not tell you, “Be angry!” or, “Be glad!”:
    each only adds more dawn to your dawn.
20. Whatever you love, whatever pleases you, do:
    it is love’s decree that I shall never go free.
21. Enough for me that your heart should feel our love, in anger
    and in making up⁷; enough that it keeps beating, day and night.

• (1) Al-zaʿl is used here in its colloquial sense of anger, not in its classical sense. It is properly pronounced with the ʿayn vowelled (zaʿal), but here the ʿayn has been made quiescent for the metre. It is a kind of playful teasing of the beloved.

Mombasa, Kenya, 1992

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