صباح الشوق

أوتار مبعثرة
ترجمة إنجليزية
شارك:
صَبَاحُ الشَّوْقِ يَكْوِي جِسْمِيَ الضَّاوِيوَأَضْحَى الْبَطْنُ مِنْهُ ضَامِرًا طَاوِي
وَأَمَّا الْقَلْبُ.. حَدِّثْ عَنْهُ لَا حَرَجٌفَقَدْ أَضْنَاهُ حَقًّا لَفْحُهُ الْكَاوِي
أُصَبِّحُ وَجْهَكِ الزَّاهِي بِأَنْفَاسِيوَكُلُّ مُنَايَ أَنْ تَعْفِي عَنِ الْغَاوِي
فَعُدْ يَا رُوحِيَ السَّاهِي – فَقَدْ أَضْنَيْـتَنِي دَهْرًا – وَأَحْيِ جِسْمِيَ الْخَاوِي
وَضُمَّ إِلَيْكَ أَضْلَاعِي وَأَوْجَاعِيفَحِضْنُكَ بَيْتِيَ الدَّافِي، لَهُ آوِي

Morning of Longing

  1. The morning of my longing sears my wasted frame,
    and leaves my belly shrunken, lean and hunger-drawn.
  2. And as for my heart, tell all you will1, you cannot overstate:
    its scorching, searing blast has truly worn it down.
  3. I greet your radiant face each morning2 with my breath;
    and all I wish is that you pardon one who has gone wrong.
  4. So come back, heedless soul of mine3: for ages you have wasted me;
    and breathe life back into my body, hollowed to the bone.
  5. Gather my ribs to you, and all my aches, for your embrace
    is my warm home, and there I take my shelter, there alone.

Notes

  1. Ḥaddith ʿanhu wa-lā ḥaraj, literally ‘speak of it, and there is no harm’, is a set Arabic phrase meaning that there is no limit to what could be said: whatever one tells of it, the truth is greater. It goes back to a hadith, ḥaddithū ʿan Banī Isrāʾīl wa-lā ḥaraj, ‘tell of the Children of Israel, and there is no harm’. The heart’s suffering is too great to be exaggerated. ↩
  2. Uṣabbiḥu means ‘I wish good morning to’: the morning greeting to the beloved is made with his very breath, not with words alone. The verb comes from the same root as ṣabāḥ, ‘morning’, which opens the poem. ↩
  3. Rūḥī, ‘my soul’, is a common endearment for the beloved. From this verse on the beloved is addressed in the masculine (al-sāhī, ‘heedless’; ḍumma, ‘gather’; ḥiḍnuka, ‘your embrace’), though verse 3 used the feminine: Arabic love poetry often speaks of a woman beloved in the masculine, and the addressee is the same. The call to the ‘soul’ to return and revive the hollow body also keeps its literal sense: without her, his body is like one whose soul has left it. ↩

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