Poking around
among the poems of Kipling,
I was astonished to stumble upon this:
Azrael's Count
Lo! The Wild Cow of the Desert, her
yeanling estrayed from her --
Lost in the wind-plaited sand-dunes -- athirst in the maze of them.
Hot-foot she follows those foot-prints -- the thrice-tangled ways of them.
Her soul is shut save to one thing -- the love-quest consuming her
Fearless she lows past the camp, our fires affright her not.
Ranges she close to the to the tethered ones -- the mares by the lances held.
Noses she softly apart the veil in the women's tent.
Lost in the wind-plaited sand-dunes -- athirst in the maze of them.
Hot-foot she follows those foot-prints -- the thrice-tangled ways of them.
Her soul is shut save to one thing -- the love-quest consuming her
Fearless she lows past the camp, our fires affright her not.
Ranges she close to the to the tethered ones -- the mares by the lances held.
Noses she softly apart the veil in the women's tent.
Kipling is the bard of the British lands from India through Afghanistan; and peppers his poems with Hindi-isms,
and slang from the pukkah-sahib.
But now this seems a straight
translation -- nay, almost a calque -- from the pre-Islamic Arabic.
I have, in this age, tried my hand at much the same
thing. Sample here:
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