1. Is there an ultimate goal beyond your glory that seekers yearn for?
Or a path ascending to your lofty threshold for riders?

2. No indeed! Neither hopes waver in your presence,
Nor do doubters frequent your court.

3. So seek leadership over the lands and people will weary of your ranks which sought you, numerous though your suitors be.
And disdain the nobility through the efforts which have made you independent of the pretentious genealogists.

4. With the blackness of battle and the reddening of swords,
The whiteness of honor and the greenness of meadows,

5. And pride in a paternal uncle whose munificence encompasses all,
And a father who prevents the debased acts.

6. By inheriting deeds you have attained the goal—
Undoubtedly before inheriting titles.

7. Your virtuous acts are many. By which of them
Have you become peerless among your contemporaries?

8. Is it by your raging attacks? Or your unfailing destiny?
Or your unstinting gifts?

9. Or the pardon you grant when sins abound?
Or your resolve as swords substitute for you?

10. The kings of earth, their domains are constricted,
Their breasts in assembly are not spacious.

11. Yet in munificence they are not hindered, and they are admired.
While yours is a miracle without admiration.

12. For your clemency is disregarding rage.
And your bounty, obliging reluctance.

13. Moreover, you are a young shoot of a clan whose covenants
Are filled with gifts and grants.

14. A provider in affliction or leader in arena,
Or speaker of wisdom.

15. A people who when the war horses charge upon them
Kill the foe, protecting their offspring from humiliation.

16. And when rain is scarce in their land
They refrain from begging the clouds, superior at seeking alternatives.

17. They battled fate but it had its vengeance on them
Through dire events, not by limit of swords.

18. Then you came, most knowledgeable of your clan’s ways,
Excelling the cavaliers of yore in horsemanship.

19. You curbed it until its events were fettered,
Claws and fangs bound.

20. Between a consulted affair you quelled with resolve
And an aspired aim you repelled with argument.

21. O you who excels at decisive words when harm impends
And surpasses rulers the morning after calumny.

22. Glory attends you while you frequent it. You receive growing favor and deny it.
If the early boasts of the boastful

23. Were purely about pride in you, they would be credible.
To al-Nāṣir son of al-Nāṣir belongs the nobility

24. Whose sun is not obscured by clouds.
A king who if you call upon him in a crisis

25. You find a lion in a soft coat.
The ringing of insects makes every persistent critic

26. Hear in his ears the ringing of insects.
He paired valor with devotion to his Lord.

27. How excellent is the prayer niche within the prayer niche!
And tomorrow he will take himself to account for Judgment Day

28. While his gifts transpire without reckoning.
Since panegyrics came to you full of praise,

29. They have been safe from fraud and lies.
So let the days pride themselves on al-Bāsil

30. Who inundates with reward and is clothed in probity.
Wakefulness made him eschew sins

31. And abstain from depravity in his manhood and youth.
I had turned away from versifying

32. When the path of rectitude became clear to me.
So with it I will clothe your sublimity

33. In the garb of kings and adornment of literary arts.
And I will present praise whose nobility matches

34. The noblest scion of the loftiest lineage.
And I will leave an enemy in the manner which

35. A lover leaves the Banū ʿAttāb.