1. Memories did not stir my youthful yearnings
Except before your blooming youth.

2. O you who carry the concerns of passion and its torment!
You have not tasted my passion and its agony.

3. If only you understood my youth,
And studied the book of love in the days of infatuation!

4. It is the worst that youth has written, and the best
That a teacher imposes on his students.

5. It is the intoxication of passions in their tipsiness,
And the bitterness of terrors in minds.

6. It is the devil's turning away from the devil of love
Out of disgust, annoyance, and fatigue.

7. Into it I cast my thoughts helter-skelter
Upon helter-skelter, and knots upon knots.

8. The sighs of a breast which, had I uttered into
The night sky, would have extinguished every star.

9. Had I recited my poetry to Layla's Madman,
He would have returned to reason and propriety.

10. He would have turned away from his passion, fearing
To be afflicted with the likes of my torment.

11. Qays tasted some sweetness in his love,
While I drank cups after cups of bitterness.

12. Whoever compares what I have suffered of anguish
To what Qays suffered, has likened Hell to a firebrand.

13. Neither can sanity be compared to madness,
Nor the sultan's daughter to the baker's daughter.

14. Horror is most terrifying when you meet it
While the lamp of your mind is shining bright.

15. Layla's lovely voice was nothing like the lovely voice
Of a Fatina adorned with the blackest of forests.

16. She was Thurya, daughter of the most honorable lineage,
With pure ancestry and noble roots.

17. Secluded in her tent, her father
Was of high station and honored titles.

18. A beauty in the prime of youth, while I was a lad
Who gathered distractions with eyelids.

19. She was infatuated with my poetry and I with her beauty,
So love came to us unbidden and unaccounted for.

20. I did not dream I would one day see Thurya's face
Coming down to me covered in my dust.

21. I did not dream that in Destiny we would meet
Quenching each other′s thirst and each other′s passion.

22. Until her messenger came to me in the dark,
And I left without hoping to return.

23. We met with none but the darkness hearing
Her words and my replies.

24. She said, “By your Lord, your poetry has captivated
My heart, brought by you, its captor.”

25. “If you are righteous towards your captive, you have made
Me alone the bride of your talent in verse.”

26. So I answered her, “It is your love that is my inspiration,
My talent and youth are devoted to you.”

27. Three arguments ensued, while love between us
Was tying up causes.

28. I suffered horrors from it that would make the resolute
Shudder and break the firmness of the darting.

29. If al-ʿUbsi had witnessed some of my tribulations,
He would have recounted to ʿAblah an amazing tale.

30. ʿAntara would have been wary of risks I undertook
Fearlessly with a heart devoid of cowardice.

31. I was afflicted by some of her kinsmen
Who spar with none but adversaries.

32. How often they crossed my path and threatened me
With death, and inundated me with their flood.

33. How many nights under the clouds I stayed awake
With their eyes around me like the eyes of wolves.

34. How often they traced me to her doors,
So I returned repelled from the doors.

35. I never attained union with her
Without the garment of death touching my clothes.

36. I would spend the night passionate, knowing what ailed her,
And spend the night distraught, and she knew what ailed me.

37. Three arguments - I did not spend a moment of them
With a mind free in devotion.

38. I severed them heedlessly with my poems
Until I cast off all propriety for love.

39. I undermined my worth and deemed lawful
The sacrosanct passions for drunkenness and frivolity.

40. This is what my poetry brought upon me. Would that
I had sealed my talent's mouth with a veil!

41. As for Thurya, she was married off
To an elderly man of wealth and prestige.

42. She did not accept a husband but they married her off
Like a bundle of daggers and swords.

43. She is my entrails, but she disavowed me, and her long
Absence from me meant my long absence from life.

44. I am that dead man who preaches to the youth
With his poetry, alive through the ages.

45. I am he whose book is like a cup of agony
Crowned by its embers with bubbles.

46. O you who carry your hopes in youth!
It is a burden of delusions upon a liar.

47. None of you has a way to water, nor was youth
In life anything but a mirage.

48. By its nature it begets afflictions for the lad,
And when they beget, they pass like clouds.

49. A cup whose surface you taste honey in,
While its dregs are bitter aloes.

50. Whoever spends his youth in love's fatigue,
Old age yokes him with hardships.