Sunday 21 March 2010

Your Love Taught me...

This is a song by Kazem El-Saher, the Iraqi composer, singer...I was hearing it just now on the radio, and it so beautiful not to share and translate....me who absolute hates translations and am a firm believer that some things need no translation whatsoever...even if one does not understand a word...I mean there are so many other songs I listen to in languages that are totally foreign to me...and I am not desperate to understand the lyrics...I just feel them and I understand...beyond the comprehensible word...

Still I am going to translate this one for you -- parts of it...I will enjoy doing so...because it is a poetry that speaks to my heart...

Needless to add -- this song is NOT dedicated to any Arab asshole, garbage, of a male...




Your Love taught me
how to feel
Sadness**
and I needed for decades
to be taught by a woman how to feel
sadness...
a woman who would let me cry in her arms
like a broken bird
Your Love taught me...
how to be sad
and for eras, I was in need of that...
I needed a woman who would gather me
like pieces of shattered glass
Your Love, my lady, taught me
the worst of habits
it taught me to read my coffee cup
a thousand times a night
and consult healers and knock on the doors of  seers
it taught me to walk the streets
and its pavements
searching your face in the rain
amidst the lights of passing cars
gathering  from your eyes
a million stars
woman who has whirled my world
whirled my pain...

Your Love, my Lady,  made me enter,
the city of Sadness
and before you
I had never entered the city of Sadness
before you I never knew
that tears were human
and that a human without sadness
is no man..
but a memory of a man...

** Sadness here is referred to in Arabic as Huzn, which is not really sadness as in a temporary emotional state but sadness - melancholy - as a state of Separation, of Being in Separation...

And the song is called : Your Love Taught me  from Madrasat Al-Hob - The School of Love. (CD)