Melinda Smith #10 Hammam (translation of a ghazal by Rabia Balkhi)

Hammam*

(translated from a ghazal by 10th century poet Rabia Balkhi رابعه بلخی  - one of the first woman poets to write in Persian)

I am back, caged in this love again,

all my daring escapes end here.

Love is a broad shoreless sea

tell me, o wise ones, who swims it and lives?

To take love all the way

you must embrace every horror;

adore ugliness like a fair face;

make sweet delight of poison.

I bucked like an unbroken mare; I did not know:

the harder you pull, the tighter the rope.

© Melinda Smith, 2016

(with many thanks to Omid Behbahani and her husband to Mr Tahami for their generous assistance with the translation, and to Dr Hashem and Mina Etminan for putting me in touch with them. I have also referred to other translations by Inamul Haq Kausar, Manouchehr Saadat Noury, and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis with Sheila R. Canby)

(*Hammam – my title, given to a ghazal with no title - means ‘bath house’ in Persian and refers to the tragic, semi-mythical story of Samanid-period poetess Rabia Balkhi. She is said to have been murdered by her brother for falling in love with one of his slaves. According to the legend he cut her throat and locked her in a bath house to die, where she wrote her last poems (including this one) on the wall in her own blood.)