كيف لو حضنته؟

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
يَا جَمَالًا رُزِقْتُ مِنْهُ بِحُلْمٍفَانْتَشَى خَاطِرِي وَأَبْرَأَ سُقْمِي
كَيْفَ لَوْ قَدْ حَضَنْتُهُ وَتَرَامَىفَوْقَ صَدْرِي فَكَانَ ضَمًّا بِضَمِّ
وَاحْتَوَيْتُ السَّنَا الْمُشِعَّ بِزَنْدِيوَالْحَرِيرُ الْأَثِيثُ يَغْمُرُ جِسْمِي
وَاسْتَوَى ثَغْرُهُ يُلَمْلِمُ ثَغْرِيأَرْشُفُ الشَّهْدَ مِنْهُ لَثْمًا بِلَثْمِ؟

What If I Had Held It?1

  1. O beauty granted to me in a dream,
    so that my mind grew drunk with joy, and sickness left without a trace!
  2. What if I had held it close, and it had flung itself
    upon my chest, till embrace was answered with embrace,
  3. and I had gathered the radiant light into my arms,
    while the thick silk2 came flooding over all my body,
  4. and its mouth, come to rest, had gathered mine into its own,
    and I had sipped the honey from it, kiss for kiss?

Notes

  1. The poet addresses the beloved as jamāl, 'beauty', and refers to that beauty throughout with the masculine pronoun, as Arabic grammar requires. The English keeps the image by calling it 'it'. The reasoning is from the lesser to the greater: if a mere dream of her beauty healed him, what would its embrace have done? The question of verse 2 runs on to the end of the poem. ↩
  2. Al-ḥarīr al-athīth, 'the thick silk'. Athīth, 'dense, luxuriant', is the classic epithet for a woman's abundant hair, so the silk that floods over him is her hair. ↩

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