The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Vol. 5 (1894) - Page 27

The Jaxartes, the Oxus original: "Sayhún, Jayhún," rivers in Central Asia., and the Euphrates are like my tears,

They make a flood greater than any rain can produce.

My eyelids remain irritated with constant weeping;

My heart is never free from sparks of fire.

The armies of love and longing overwhelmed me,

And forced the armies of my patience to break and flee.

I have risked my life too freely for their love,

And losing my life would be the least of my troubles.

May God never punish the eye that saw those charms,

Which are enshrined and brighter than the full moon!

I found myself struck down by beautiful, wide eyes,

Which pierced my heart with a bow that has no string. He refers to the "arrows" of a lover's gaze.

And her soft, lithe, swaying shape enchanted me,

Like the swaying branches of a willow tree.

I long for a union with them so that I may win

Mastery over the pains, anxieties, and cares of love.

For love of them, I waste away morning and evening,

And I suspect all this came to me from the evil eye original: "eyne," an archaic plural of eye..

And when his verses were ended, he wept until he fainted away, remaining unconscious for a long while. As soon as he came to himself, he looked right and left, and seeing no one in the desert, he became fearful of wild beasts. So he climbed to the top of a high mountain, where he heard the voice of a human being original: "son of Adam" speaking within a cave. He listened, and truly, they were the words of a monk original: "devotee" who had renounced the world and given himself up to religious works and worship. He knocked three times at the cave door, but the hermit gave him no answer nor came out to him; therefore he groaned aloud and recited these verses:—

What path can I find to reach my desire?

How can I escape from anxiety, worry, pain, and distress?

All these terrors join together to make me old and gray,

In both head and heart, before my youth is even over.

I find no help for my passion, nor

A friend to lighten my load of distress and pain.

How many great troubles I have endured!

I see that Fortune has turned her back on me against my will.

Ah, have mercy, mercy on a lover’s heart,

Doomed to drink the cup of parting and abandonment!

A fire is in his heart, his inner strength wastes away,

And separation has made his mind completely useless.

1. The Jaxartes and the Oxus rivers. The latter (the Jayhún, Amu Darya, Oxus, or Bactros) is famous for dividing Persia original: "Iran" from the lands of the Turks original: "Turan" or "Tartaria". The lands to its north are known as Ma wara al-Nahr original: "Mawerannahar," meaning "What is behind the stream" or Transoxiana, and their capital cities were successively Samarkand and Bukhara.