WRITING GATHERING FIELD

In 2008, I began keeping an "open notebook" of translations from primary and secondary source materials in the form of a blog called Writing Gathering Field, and this year the blog is still going strong. Please visit often and smash the Subscribe button so you NEVER MISS A POST!

In this space, I will resurface older posts with commentary, beginning with AʿSHA'S PEARL. Whether this poem is truly the work of al-Aʿsha Maymun ibn Qays, which some scholars doubt, is immaterial despite my serious interest in this poet. It's a brilliant setting of a motif I'm writing about in Hands at Work, where the poet compares his beloved to a pearl, and then describes everything the pearl-diver must go through to obtain it. Towards the end of the poem, my translation collapses three verses of Arabic into two English ones. I don’t believe I've done this anywhere else, and for scholarly purposes it will need to be revised, but for poetic purposes I wouldn't change a thing, least of all this verse and a half:

Who craves the pearl in the whirl of the unfathomable is parted
from his life, and perishes beneath its heaving surface.
Who gains it gains eternity without end