A Ghazal by Saadi Shirazi

Ghazal #8

Oh, the cup-bearer! bring forth the water, I am parched beyond measure;
First, quench my thirst and only then my followers.
Before this, I would have never lifted my eyes from the sweet sleep;
Yet on the day of separation from friends, I bid farewell to this sweet sleep.
For every pious man in the mosque that sees the beautiful beloved passing by;
And glances at her eyebrows, shall forget the direction of his prayers in mihrab.
I am not like a wild prey seeking to cling to its meagre life;
If the beloved shoots her arrows at me, I will stand to embrace them.
No one knows the worth of the soul companion like me;
Only the fish cast on the dry ground knows the value of the water.
When immersed waist-deep into the water of love, I floundered;
Now, I am still the same in the endless sea of love.
Today, I am but drowned in this sea and until I find a shore;
Then, I shall relate to you the travails and woes of the one drowned in love.
If faithless I was, then I took the beloved’s complaint to Qa’an the mongol[1];
For he, though an infidel, would only slay his enemies yet this stone-hearted beloved her friends.
The lover raises a hue and cry out of desperation for the multitudes of beloved’s wooers;
The doorman can scarcely keep the crowd out of the house when the minstrel sings.
“Saadi! She is but heartless and cruel to you, don’t go to her no more.”
[Saadi responds] Oh you the heedless one! Do you think I go to her? Nay, it is she that pulls the hook.

[1] the third son of Genghis Khan, was renowned for his capability, sound judgment, prudence, steadiness, and dignity. Yet he had a marked fondness for the company of women and for drinking wine, and because of this he was repeatedly reproached by his father.

Translated into English by Ali Hassanpour Darbandi 
Ali is currently a PhD student in English at York University, Toronto. He has done some work on nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His research has been published in Neophilologus, Anglia: Journal of English Philology, Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for American Studies, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik among many others. He often focuses on secularization narratives in US literature of the antebellum era, how religious and secular are intertwined, and privatization of religion in the context of nineteenth-century America. He has also translated a book in philosophy, titled Marxism, Analytic Philosophy and Language, which investigates the newly founded relationship between Marxism and Analytic Philosophy, particularly the recent interest of some analytic philosophers like Brandon and Redding in Hegelian thoughts