فـــــــــي القُـــــــــــــدس (In Jerusalem) Posted by Hichem on May 15, 2012 in Arabic Language, Vocabulary
Today, May 15th, is to be remembered as يــــــوم النكبــــــــــــــة (“The Day of the Catastrophe”), a day commemorated by virtually everyone in the Arab world—in addition to an important number of Orthodox Jews who not only vigorously uphold the Palestinian cause, but who also, in the name of the Jewish faith which they dearly cherish and identify with, are uncompromisingly opposed to the apartheid ideology of Zionism.
Now, setting all political considerations aside, here is a little fragment of a major piece of modern Arabic poetry that deserves to be presented in such an occasion.
I’m confident that upon hearing its verses, no lengthy introduction of its author will be required.
That is why, please, simply meet:
تمِّيــــــــــم البرغُـــــــــــــوثــــــــــي (Tamim Al-Barghouthi)
Since the already existing English translations available on the Web do not truly render it justice, here is my own translation, which I believe is more faithful to the spirit of the original Arabic poem:
فــــــــــــــــــــــــي القُــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــدس (In Jerusalem)
مَرَرْنـــــــــــــا عَلــى دارِ الحبــــــيب فرَدَّنـــــــــــــــــــــــا
By our beloved’s house we passed, but were turned away
عَنِ الدارِ قانـــــــــونُ الأعــــــــــادي وســــــورُهـــــــا
By the foes’ laws and walls
فَقُــــــــــــلْتُ لنفســــــــــــــي رُبمَّــــــــــــا هِيَ نِعْمَــــــــــــــــــــــــةٌ
A blessing in disguise, I thought to myself
فماذا تَرَى في القُدسِ حيـــــــــــــــــــــــنَ تـــــــــــــــــــَزُورُهـــــــــــــــــــــــا؟
After all, what’s in Jerusalem, when you see it?
تَــــــــــــــــــــرَى كُلَّ ما لا تستطيــــــــــــــــــــعُ احتِمالَــــــــــــــــــــهُ
All that which you cannot bear is what you see
إذا مـــــــــــــــــــا بَدَتْ من جَانِـــــــــــــــــــبِ الدَّرْبِ دورُهــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــا
Whenever its houses emerge along the side of the path
وما كلُّ نفـــــــــــــــــــسٍ حينَ تَلْقَـــــــــــــــــــــــى حَبِيبَهـــــــــــــــــــا تُـسَــــــــــــــــــــرُّ
No, not every soul is delighted to meet its soul mate
ولا كُلُّ الغـِيــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــابِ يُضِيــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــرُها
Nor must every absence fill it with pain
فإن سـرَّهــــــــــــــــــــــا قبلَ الفِـــــــــــــراقِ لِقـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــاؤُه
For its secret resides in meeting it, before bidding it farewell
فليسَ بمأمــــــــــــــــــــــونٍ عليها ســــــــــــــــــــــرُورُها
There’s no telling if there is ever a safe haven for its happiness
متى تُبْصِــــــــــــــــــــــــــــرِ القُدسَ العتيقــــــــــــــــــــــــــــةَ مَــــــــــــــــــــــــــــرَّةً
Yet if you looked upon the old Jerusalem once
! فســــــــــــوفَ تراها العَيْــــــــــــــــــــــــنُ حَيْثُ تُدِيرُهــــــــــــــــــــــــا
Then wherever your eye is set afterwards, you shall see it!
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