زيدي غيابا

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
زِيدِي غِيَابًا تَزِيدِي قَلْبِيَ الْوَصَبَاوَلَا يَلِيقُ جَفَا قَلْبٍ إِلَيْكِ صَبَا
أَلَيْسَ يَكْفِيكِ أَنِّي فِيكِ مُفْتَتَنٌلِمَ التَّفَنُّنُ فِي التَّعْذِيبِ؟ وَاعَجَبَا!
ثَمِلْتُ فِيكِ وَلَا رَاحٌ كَرَاحِكِ لِيتَهُزُّنِي فَتَرَانِي أُسْقِطُ الرُّطَبَا
هَوَاكِ أَطْرَبَنِي فَخِلْتُ أَنْ طَرِبَتْمَعِي الْغُصُونُ الَّتِي تَسْتَمْلِحُ الطَّرَبَا
أَحِنُّ كَالطِّفْلِ لَمْ تُرْضِعْهُ وَالِدَةٌكَأَنَّ فِي جِسْمِهِ، إِنْ تَلْمِسِي، لَهَبًا
حُمَّى، وَهَلْوَسَةٌ، فِي ظُلْمِهِ اتَّحَدَافَهَلْ لِعَدْلِكِ أَنْ يَسْتَأْصِلَ الْكُرَبَا؟

Stay Away Longer1

  1. Stay away longer, then: you'll only add to my heart's pain2;
    it ill becomes you to shun a heart that yearns your way.
  2. Is it not enough for you that I am so enthralled?
    Why make an art of tormenting me3? What wonder, what dismay!
  3. I am drunk on you, and there's no wine for me like yours4:
    it shakes me, and you watch me let the ripe dates fall away5.
  4. Your love has stirred me into rapture, till I fancied that the boughs,
    the boughs that relish rapture, swayed in rapture as I sway6.
  5. I yearn like a child that no mother ever nursed,
    as though his body, should you touch it, were ablaze.
  6. Fever and delirium have joined in wronging him7:
    then has your justice power to root his anguish all away?

Notes

  1. The imperative zīdī ghiyāban, 'increase your absence', is not a real request but a defiant, wounded challenge: go on, stay away even longer, and see what it does to me. The rest of the verse turns the challenge into a reproach. ↩
  2. The verse ends on a sound-play (jinās) between al-waṣab, a lasting, wearing illness, and ṣabā, 'he leaned, yearned in love'. The two rhyme-words mirror each other: the heart that leans towards her is the heart she makes ill. ↩
  3. Muftatan, 'enthralled', comes from fitna, 'enchantment, trial', and al-tafannun, 'artful variation, virtuosity', from fann, 'art'. The two words echo each other in sound, so the line sets his helpless enchantment against her inventive cruelty: she torments him as an artist varies a theme. Wā-ʿajabā is a cry of astonishment voiced with the particle of lament (wā), so it carries dismay as well as wonder. ↩
  4. Rāḥ means 'wine', but it is also the plural of rāḥa, 'palm of the hand'. 'No rāḥ like your rāḥ' therefore says both 'no wine like your wine', the intoxication of her presence, and 'no hands like your hands'. The double sense (tawriya) prepares the next half-verse, in which something shakes him. ↩
  5. An allusion to the Qur'an (19:25), where Mary, in the pains of labour beneath a palm tree, is told: 'Shake towards you the trunk of the palm, and it will drop upon you ripe, fresh dates.' The poet makes himself the palm tree: when she shakes him, he yields his sweetest fruit. ↩
  6. Ṭarab is the rapture, near to ecstasy, that music and love arouse, and the verb aṭraba means to move someone to that state. The swaying of branches in the breeze is a traditional image of such rapture, so the poet imagines the trees swaying in time with his own joy. The word is repeated three times in the verse, as if the rapture itself were spreading. ↩
  7. 'Him' is the unnursed child of the previous verse, that is, the poet himself. The verse turns on a contrast (ṭibāq) between ẓulm, 'wrong, injustice', and ʿadl, 'justice'. Fever and delirium are pictured as two oppressors who have made common cause against him; the beloved is appealed to as a just ruler who alone can end their tyranny. The question is a plea rather than a real question. ↩

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