“أَسْهَرْتِنِي شَجَنًا عَلَيْكِ”وَتَرَكْتِنِي أَقْتَاتُ سُهْدِي
فَكَأَنَّنِي وَحْدِي الْمُعَنَّىوَكَأَنَّنِي الْمُشْتَاقُ وَحْدِي!
كَمْ ذَا شَكَوْتُكِ لِلْهَوَىإِنْ كَانَ يُنْصِفُنِي وَيُجْدِي
وَبَثَثْتُ لِلْأَقْمَارِ حُزْنِيوَاشْتَدَّ بِي شَجَنِي وَوَجْدِي
عُودِي لِمَنْ يَهْوَاكِ لَاتَدَعِيهِ فِي أَخْذٍ وَرَدِّ
You Kept Me Awake
- “You kept me wakeful, grieving you,”1
and left me sleeplessness to feed upon2. - As though I were the only one tormented,
as though the one who longs were I alone! - How often I have brought my case against you before Love,
in hope that Love would do me justice and be of some avail! - I poured my sorrow out before the moons3,
and grief and passion in me have more fiercely grown. - Come back to him who loves you; do not leave him
tossed to and fro, now taken up, now thrown4.
Notes
- The opening words stand in quotation marks in the Arabic, as though the poet were citing a phrase already spoken, his own long-repeated complaint to her, and making it the starting point of the poem. She is the one who has cost him his sleep. ↩
- Aqtātu suhdī, literally ‘I make my sleeplessness my food (qūt)’: wakefulness is all the nourishment he has left. ↩
- Confiding one’s sorrow to the moon, the sleepless lover’s only companion in the night, is an old motif of Arabic love poetry. The plural ‘moons’ suggests night after night, moon after moon, of such confiding. ↩
- Fī akhdhin wa-radd, ‘in taking and giving back’, is an idiom for endless back-and-forth, wavering and indecision: the beloved draws him close, then pushes him away. ↩
English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.