I Can’t

Arcāna ego ēmittere iam nōn possum.

Dignē tum ea āmittere iam nōn possum.

Est in mē quod tenet mihī gaudium, sed

Ad hoc digitum intendere numquam possum

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1236, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 28 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #815 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry. 

اسرار ز دست داد مـی نتوانم

اورا بـه ســزا گـشاد مـی نـتوانــم

چیزیست درونم که مرا خوش دارد

انگشت بــرو نـهاد مـی نـتوانــــــم

asrār z dast dād mī natvānam

ūrā be sazā goshād mī natvānam

chīzīst darūnam ke marā xosh dārad 

angosht barū nehād mī natvānam

The secrets—I can’t let them slip out

Them—I can’t rightly open them up

There’s something inside me that keeps me happy

I can’t put a finger on it.

The first line seems to mean “He gave out secrets, but I can’t.” But this would be wrong, for the line is archaic in structure and literally means: secrets from the hand give I can’t, i.e., I can’t give secrets out. In modern Persian, the phrase “I can’t give” is usually  rendered like this: namītavānam bedeham [نمیتوانم بدهم]. But here Rūmī chose to use  [1] a so-called “short infinitive” (dād [داد]) for “give,” [2] an archaic negation which reverses namī to mīna, and [3] to syncopate, i.e. shorten, tavānam to tvāmam. The result is dād mī natvānam, both ancient in structure and poetic in feeling.

The meaning of the quatrain is fairly evident. However, there is one small word ū [او], which is a bit out of focus. It means—well—“he, she, it.” It appears in the second line in an oblique case ūrā [ اورا] and in the fourth line as the object of the preposition bar “on”: barū [برو]. When so used ū becomes about as slippery as the Latin eī, eum, or eō. We don’t know if the reference is to human beings or things or abstract ideas. What complicates things even more is the fact that sometimes in Persian (and in Latin as well) plural nouns can be refered to in the singular. All this means is that we don’t really know if the second line should be

I can’t open [them] for him or I can’t open them.

Similarly, the fourth line could be:

I can’t put a finger on it or I can’t show [it] to him.

It seems to me that unlike the translators Houshmand and Gamard, it would be best to leave “him” out of it, and thus my translation slips and slides to what is simple and so I translate ū as “them” or "it," as the case may be.

Finally, it is worth drawing attention to the word xosh [خوش] in line three. Most often it means “happy” or “good,” but it also had an archaic meaning of “beautiful.” This adds another dimension to line 3, for it says that there is something beautiful inside that is part of the secret of just plain being.

 Here is a free translation:

I can’t let the secrets slip out; I just can’t.

I can’t open them up; no, I can’t.

There’s something beautiful inside me. 

I cannot pin it down; I really can't.