Love’s Spark

The trees and the birds
have long safeguarded
a spark known as Love,
and the ducks on the lake,
floating in the night of time,
never cease teaching humans
how to dance with their age,
also
how to float on the surface
of their melancholy.

 

The Child of Time

Time never tires of listening,
always waiting to get its fill of us,
so that it, too, can be.
Time always calls me:
‘My little child!’
and tells me it’s nothing but a void
without my magic dance
at the gates of the moment.
It murmurs in my ear that its blood
is cooled in my veins.

I am the child of Time, I say:
Time tastes of the most delicious wine
we drink it, and it drinks us
we and time await
our drunkenness together
till the angel of indulgence
wholly unembarrassed
crosses our melancholy foreheads.

 

-Hanane Aad

Translated by Peter Waugh and Hanane Aad

 

شرارة

الأشجار والعصافير تحرس أبداً
شرارة في الكون اسمها الحب
والبطّ العائم منذ دهر في البحيرة
يلقّن البشر بلا كلل
كيف يراقصون أعمارهم،
أيضاً
كيف يعومون على سطح كآباتهم.

 

طفلة الوقت

الوقت مثابر على الاصغاء
ينتظر أن بنا نملأه
لكي يكون.
يناديني أبداً:يا ٱبنتي الصغيرة
يقصّ عليّ أنْ عدمٌ هو
بلا رقصي الساحر
على أبواب اللحظة
يهمس لي أنْ في عروقي
دمه يدفق.
أنا طفلة الوقت أقول:
للوقت طعم الخمرة الألذّ
نحتسيه، يحتسينا
نثمل كلانا
كي يعبر بلا ارتباك
ملاك الرأفة
على جباهنا الكئيبة.

 

-Hanane Aad

 

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Hanane Aad is a Lebanese poet, journalist and translator who has lived in Austria since 2009. She has published seven books: five in Arabic, Who Will Buy Me Certainty? (2015) in English, and Duet of Flowers (2016). Her most recent, Duet of Flowers, was a collaboration with the Japanese poet Mariko Sumikura and published in both Japanese and English. Hanane has read her poetry in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Her poetry has been translated into seventeen languages. She won awards for excellence in poetry at the Tudor Arghezi Literature Festival 2014 and foreign poetry at the Poesis Festival 2011 of Satu Mare, Romania. Hanane Aad also received the Prize of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture in 2000 and the International Award for Excellence in Journalism of the International Catholic Union of the Press in 2001 in Geneva.