قل للعميد عميد الملك والأدب

Tell the Vizier, the pillar of the state and learning, … be blessed in your two feasts, the festival of the Persians and the Arabs.

This one gestures with a morning draught of cloud-born wine, … and that one points at evening toward the daughter of the vine.

A nature chosen for every virtuous deed, … so that if it were called to aught but good, it would not answer.

It is she who plunged me into his affection, … body and soul I would ransom them, not merely by my father.

They restored the dawn of a youth I no longer remember, … bringing back my life from close at hand.

My old age grew sweet to me while death watched me, … with the look of a suspicious watcher; but for them, it would not have sweetened.

An adversary who once grappled with me grew partisan in my defense, … and whenever time treated me ill, he dealt with me kindly.

I attained with the straight pen made from a reed, … what cannot be reached by marching feet or lances.

And I won through striving and through fortune, the two things, … that are the twin desires of every soul and every quest.

If you were to spin the world's millstone, its regions entrusted to you, … it would revolve without a central pivot.

I have reached the utmost limit of my lifespan, … experiencing every western turn and growing familiar with disasters.

Whenever I filled myself with fury against my era, … I found I was merely blowing upon a burning coal.

Time is nothing less than a single day whose tomorrow … is like your yesterday, and the past like what is awaited.

If you wish to wish for the whole of time's existence, … or witness what has passed of bygone centuries,

Then look at the journeys of the people who have gone before, … and observe their battalions from the depths of books.

You will find their differences in excellence widely varied, … though you brought their stations close in lineage.

This one is like a crown upon a head you revere, … while that one is like coarse hair clinging to a tail.

People look alike to the eye, yet between them lies … what lies between God's holy sanctuary and a ruined house.

In the aloe-wood is what the sweet musk is joined to … in fragrance, and in it is refuse cast aside with firewood.

Do not seek wealth through worldly tricks and cunning maneuvers, … for often what is sought arrives without a chase.

The young man's allotted sustenance comes through an obvious cause … that he can see, and sometimes it arrives without a cause.

Contend with the revolving sphere, and it will meet you … with arguments of willingness or dread, whether you wish it or not.

I see it pause for me while it races onward carrying me, … with the headlong gallop of knights at practice.

Like fire devouring whatever sustains it with ravenous greed, … making no distinction between the fragrant naba' wood and the willow.

I have grown stripped and bare while the vicissitudes strip me, … with the steady habit of locusts when they take over the grass.

I have become a debt owed by the world because of my antiquity, … while death's messengers demand payment and put me off.

I have endured the conditions of this age, stepping forward into … its terrors, falling struck down though seeking no conflict.

He who is used to the bite of the sword upon his crown, … finds the snapping of dome-beams light upon his jaw-bones.