أخبي هواها

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
يَا مَنْ أُسِرُّ هَوَاهَا أَنْ يُحِسَّ بِهِقَلْبِي، وَأَمْلَأُ مِنْهَا خَاطِرِي وَهَجَا
يُشِعُّ مِنْهُ اتِّقَادًا.. يَصْطَفِيكِ رُؤًىتَجْتَاحُنِي، كُلَّمَا اللَّيْلُ الْبَهِيمُ سَجَا
يَنُوشُكِ الْغَيْمُ رَشًّا، تَجْفِلِينَ رَشًايَنِمُّ عَنْ حُسْنِ مَا أَبْدَى وَمَا انْفَرَجَا
وَتَسْتَظِلِّينَ بِالْأَهْدَابِ مِنْ خَجَلٍوَيَسْرِقُ الْغَيْمُ مِنْ أَنْفَاسِكِ الْأَرَجَا
حَتَّى إِذَا ارْتَجَفَتْ فِي الرِّيحِ ضَحْكَتُكُمْمَدَدْتُ كَفِّي، وَكَانَ الْبَرْدُ لِي حُجَجَا
وَآثَرَتْ شَفَتَاكِ الصَّمْتَ مِنْ خَفَرٍوَفِي ابْتِسَامَتِكِ السِّرُّ الَّذِي انْبَلَجَا
لَمْ نَذْكُرِ الْحُبَّ، لَكِنْ كُلُّ مَا سَكَتَتْعَنْهُ الشِّفَاهُ بِأَعْمَاقِ الدَّمِ اخْتَلَجَا

I Hide Her Love

  1. O you whose love I hide, lest even my own heart should sense it1,
    while I fill my mind with you, a glow that's burning bright:
  2. a glow that blazes out of it, and chooses you in visions
    that sweep across me when a stillness settles2 on the pitch-black night.
  3. The clouds brush you with spray, and you start like a fawn3,
    a start that betrays the beauty of all it showed, and all that opened to the light.
  4. And you shelter in the shade of your lashes, out of shyness,
    while the clouds steal the fragrance from your breath.
  5. Until, when your laughter trembled in the wind,
    I held out my hand, and the cold was my excuse.
  6. Your lips preferred silence, out of modesty,
    but in your smile there was the secret, dawning into sight.
  7. We never spoke of love; but all the lips kept silent
    quivered in the depths of the blood.

Notes

  1. A hyperbole: he hides his love for her so carefully that he keeps it even from his own heart. The Arabic, 'O you whose love I keep secret', uses the third person inside the vocative ('whose love… her love'), as Arabic often does, and moves to direct address in verse 2. ↩
  2. Sajā, 'grew still, fell calm', recalls the Qur'anic oath (93:2) 'by the night when it grows still'. Al-bahīm, 'pitch-black', is night without a glimmer of light. ↩
  3. Rashshan, 'with a sprinkling, a fine spray', and rashaʾan, 'like a fawn', differ only by a final hamza: a play on sound (jinās) that joins the rain and the startled fawn in one moment. The fawn, graceful and shy, is a classic image for the beloved. ↩

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