Your eyebrow, dear, is like a charm

Joseph Tsarfati

Early 16th Century

Your eyebrow, dear, is like a charm
   that draws to you life’s greatest joys.
Rounded like a bow, that brow,
   or like a moon in half eclipse.
Your eye, beside it, is a pool,
   all sparkle, like a diadem—
Every sparkle is a dart,
   thrusting ever at my heart!
The flashes from your eyes are darts;
   your eyebrows, bows with tight-strung cords,
and on those cords those darts are poised,
   pointing at your lovers’ hearts.
Where they strike, men fall; yes, thousands
   perish, hopeless, every day—
But you look on cold, hard, and dour.
   Your lovers’ illness has no cure.
Let me walk round and round your house
   until I die, though men may mock,
adoring every gate and door,
   daily waiting for your call,
writing words the dead will read,
   rousing corpses with my song—
until you become aware,
   hear my cry, and heed my tear.
Ah, how I wish that I could please you,
   long for reconciliation,
always praising you in verse,
   singing to every passing ear.
My heart’s hard blade is dulled by pain,
   my soft insides are desiccated—
But your stone heart deflects the words I utter;
   my prayers go in one ear and out the other.
As long as you are supple as a twig,
   lush as a vine weighed down with bursting grapes;
as long as you are fragrant as a rose,
   and sap is flowing sweetly in your veins,
does it make sense to be so hard and headstrong,
   to toss your lovers like straw into flames?—
One day you’ll find your golden hair’s gone gray,
   and loveless you will spend your latter days.
The beauty Time sowed in your face
   Time will mow down and not renew.
The throne you thought was yours forever,
   Time will throw down in time to come.
The cord that binds me to your love,
   Time will yet sever with his scythe—
Time raises men and humbles them by turns,
   and takes his own revenge for lovers spurned.
Old-age days are few and cruel,
   filled with pain and aches and sighs,
once those days have run their course,
   you find your end inside a grave.
Black-haired days are days of fun;
   days of youth are days of joy—
Lady, take a lover now,
   while youth is shining on your brow!

Translated by
Raymond P.
Scheindlin
.

Credits

Joseph Tsarfati, “Your Eyebrow, Dear, Is Like a Charm” (poem, Rome, early 16th century). Published in: Mivḥar ha-shirah ha-ʻivrit be-Italyah= Anthologie der hebräischen Dichtung in Italien, ed. Jefim Schirmann (Berlin: Schocken, 1934), 223–227.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 5.

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Creator Bio

Joseph Tsarfati

d. 1527

Joseph ben Samuel Tsarfati, also known as Giuseppe Gallo, was a physician, poet, mathematician, and linguist. Tsarfati lived in Rome and attended to a highly fashionable clientele, including cardinals. The pope extended to Tsarfati the same privileges that his father had been accorded, including the right to treat Christian patients, an exemption from wearing the Jewish badge, and papal protection. Tsarfati hosted David ha-Reuveni during the latter’s stay in Rome (1524–1525). Tsarfati wrote many poems, three of which were published in his lifetime, as well as a translation of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina into Hebrew, of which only his introductory poem has survived. He died during the Sack of Rome in 1527.

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