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Andalus: Moorish Songs of Love and Wine
The idea of Moorish Spain captures the modern imagination, with its tales of knowledge shared across the borders of medieval Islam and Christendom, and of courts resounding to the gentle oriental strains of lute and ney. Yet it is an elusive place, glimpsed in the haunted emptiness of the Alhambra's gilded halls or amidst the pillars of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. This collection of its poetry, in a sparkling new translation by T. J. Gorton, fills those deserted spaces with the Moorish lust for life, and with a near-suffocating desire for love and for the rich enchantments of wine, laughter, moonlit picnics, and bare flesh.
126 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 5, 2015
A very mixed collection. Some of the poetry is excellent, some completely vulgar and seems to be included for novelty or shock value, but the main problem with the collection seems to be that the translations do not flow. It is always a problem in the translation of poetry, and it takes a particularly skilled poet to pull it off well. Here are a couple of examples that I think represent the most beautiful aspects of the Andalusian tradition of poetry particularly well.
Mortal souls are weak, you say, and weak as they may be,
The burden I’ve thrust upon them is heavier to bear than mountains.
My cares are so great, as great as is my passion,
That my suffering heart is tortured to the end.
He who follows an alluring glance down the road to passionate love,
Will have to reject all counsel and all blame;
For my heart and I have fled the realm of reason altogether,
The day that it submitted to the tyranny of her yes;
For love is but a glance that infects you with passion,
An illness that baffles all the doctors with their dugs.
And strange it is, that a carefree wandering eye
Can lead the heart to such a grievous wound—
For it cant’ be for God’s sake that a mortal, precious soul
Is brought low by love, from where it was!
Ah, when I was young, those moments that I spent
In exaltation at the joy of love fulfilled;
I took my loved one to a secret, lonely place,
Where no-one else could see us—but I shunned forbidden love;
On that day we could see the gazelles at play, and rekindled
A love from long, long ago.
I could not sober up from her glances’ heady wine,
So bright, it lit up all the world as though it dawned anew.
She stripped away the sheath of clouds
From the sharpest lightning-polished Yemeni blades, and smiled:
Tears well up in my eyes and ran like pearls down my clothes.
I found again her mouth, the one I was yearning to drink from,
But no! I could not forget that my love is chaste, ‘Udhri,”
While my heart fluttered as did my whole being, as though
The lightning-flashes of Hima shared my passion.
That night, the full moon shared my passion.
That night, the full moon shared my bed,
And the eyes of the falling stars kept watch over me.
I drank pure sweetness and light from the spring
Of a mouth adorned with pearls,
Sipping its liquor laced with honey, and with it
Kissed a sea of ecstasy swimming with daisies.
Oh, the coolness of that mouth, how it quenched my
burning thirst!
Oh, the heat of those sighs, how they caused my heart to melt!
Beauty’s garden, ripe fruit for youth to pick
That willowy branch bent down heavy to me,
Ready for me to harvest.
I spent the night watering the roses of her cheeks, with my tears
Until the narcissus of her gaze had quite wilted by the dawn.
Other women tried to work their wiles upon my heart,
But what have their saucy hips to do with my pure love?
If only God could cause those days to come again,
As He sometimes renews His favours to gazelles of the plain.
Ibn Zamrouk, the “Poet of the Alhambra”
When will I be able to tell you how I feel?
Oh, my consolation and my torture!
When will my tongue take the place of these poems
I write to you?
God knows that it’s because of you that I have come to this:
My food has no taste, the very wine I drink is flat.
You’d seduce a pious hermit, be pretext for childishness—
You are the sun, eclipsed and veiled from my sight;
The full moon, shining through the slightest film of clouds,
Cannot compete with your face, luminous behind its veil.
Ibn Zaidun
Mortal souls are weak, you say, and weak as they may be,
The burden I’ve thrust upon them is heavier to bear than mountains.
My cares are so great, as great as is my passion,
That my suffering heart is tortured to the end.
He who follows an alluring glance down the road to passionate love,
Will have to reject all counsel and all blame;
For my heart and I have fled the realm of reason altogether,
The day that it submitted to the tyranny of her yes;
For love is but a glance that infects you with passion,
An illness that baffles all the doctors with their dugs.
And strange it is, that a carefree wandering eye
Can lead the heart to such a grievous wound—
For it cant’ be for God’s sake that a mortal, precious soul
Is brought low by love, from where it was!
Ah, when I was young, those moments that I spent
In exaltation at the joy of love fulfilled;
I took my loved one to a secret, lonely place,
Where no-one else could see us—but I shunned forbidden love;
On that day we could see the gazelles at play, and rekindled
A love from long, long ago.
I could not sober up from her glances’ heady wine,
So bright, it lit up all the world as though it dawned anew.
She stripped away the sheath of clouds
From the sharpest lightning-polished Yemeni blades, and smiled:
Tears well up in my eyes and ran like pearls down my clothes.
I found again her mouth, the one I was yearning to drink from,
But no! I could not forget that my love is chaste, ‘Udhri,”
While my heart fluttered as did my whole being, as though
The lightning-flashes of Hima shared my passion.
That night, the full moon shared my passion.
That night, the full moon shared my bed,
And the eyes of the falling stars kept watch over me.
I drank pure sweetness and light from the spring
Of a mouth adorned with pearls,
Sipping its liquor laced with honey, and with it
Kissed a sea of ecstasy swimming with daisies.
Oh, the coolness of that mouth, how it quenched my
burning thirst!
Oh, the heat of those sighs, how they caused my heart to melt!
Beauty’s garden, ripe fruit for youth to pick
That willowy branch bent down heavy to me,
Ready for me to harvest.
I spent the night watering the roses of her cheeks, with my tears
Until the narcissus of her gaze had quite wilted by the dawn.
Other women tried to work their wiles upon my heart,
But what have their saucy hips to do with my pure love?
If only God could cause those days to come again,
As He sometimes renews His favours to gazelles of the plain.
Ibn Zamrouk, the “Poet of the Alhambra”
When will I be able to tell you how I feel?
Oh, my consolation and my torture!
When will my tongue take the place of these poems
I write to you?
God knows that it’s because of you that I have come to this:
My food has no taste, the very wine I drink is flat.
You’d seduce a pious hermit, be pretext for childishness—
You are the sun, eclipsed and veiled from my sight;
The full moon, shining through the slightest film of clouds,
Cannot compete with your face, luminous behind its veil.
Ibn Zaidun
December 9, 2025
Absolutely wonderful, throughly enjoyed the collected poems, fragments, and commentary. Highly recommend.
Read the first 36 pages on a train between Ben Guerir and Rabat in Morocco, and the rest on a flight from Casablanca to London.
Read the first 36 pages on a train between Ben Guerir and Rabat in Morocco, and the rest on a flight from Casablanca to London.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews