1. The feast, in what state have you returned, O feast?
Is it with what has passed, or is there in you something renewed?

2. As for the loved ones, the desert lies between us,
Would that, without you, the desert and they were deserted!

3. Were it not for my pride, my heart would not ache with what makes it ache,
And to be chained is but letters, not truly being chained.

4. And sweeter to me than my sword was to sleep
On the dunes like gazelles curled up.

5. Time has left in my heart and my liver
Nothing for an eye to orphan or a bosom to mourn.

6. O cupbearer, is it wine in your cups
Or in your cups anxiety and vigil?

7. I am rocks; why can’t you move me,
With this wine and these songs?

8. When I wanted the wine pure,
I found it so, though the beloved was lost.

9. What have I seen in life that pleases me most?
That I weep for what makes me envied.

10. I have come to spend the evening in a barren camp,
I, the wealthy man, and my promises the riches.

11. I descended among liars whose hospitality
Is limited, neither traveling nor women.

12. Men’s generosity is in their hands, their generosity
Is in their tongues; they are neither generous nor is generosity theirs.

13. Death seizes not any soul among their souls
Without his hand stinking because of its rottenness.

14. From every soft, flabby belly
There pours forth one who is neither horseman nor courted woman.

15. Every time an evil slave assassinates his master
Or betrays him, he is established in Egypt.

16. The eunuch has become leader of the villains there,
So the free man is enslaved and the slave worshiped.

17. The vultures of Egypt have neglected its foxes,
For the starlings have perished and the bunches decayed.

18. A slave is not a free man’s brother, however righteous,
Even if he is born in the clothes of the free.

19. Only purchase a slave with his rod along with him,
For slaves are filthy creatures, treacherous.

20. I did not expect to live to a time
When a dog insults me and is praised.

21. Nor did I imagine people to be gone
And the like of my father to exist.

22. And that the black gap-toothed one
Is obeyed by the honking simpletons.

23. A hungry man eats my provisions and stops me
So it may be said, “The greatly esteemed one is wanted.”

24. A man whose pregnant female slave manages him
Is a cuckold of hot eyes and addled wits.

25. He assembles her a dowry and the dowry for her midwife, too,
The likes of her, hellfire was created for.

26. And in her presence the taste of death is sweet to its drinker.
Death in disgrace is most craved.

27. Who taught the black eunuch gentle manners?
Do his noble white forebears hunt, or his fathers before him?

28. Or is his ear criminals’ in the broker’s hand?
Or his worth when he is sold in the markets reduced?

29. The vilest of villains excuses himself
In every vileness, and some excuse is refutation.

30. That is because the noble whites are incapable
Of nobility, so what of the black eunuchs?