I think that cultural diversity is one of the fascinating products of humanity. It's really interesting to see how the interaction of human with their environment and the problems has produced such a colourful blend.
Poetry with its different shapes may be one of the oldest and most authentic entities that tell the story of cultures. Romantic poetry is the most famous in all cultures as far as I know and you it can show us how different people describe their love differently.
Sometimes, however, one comes across situations where cultural differences dissolve and you are in front of nothing but common human feelings. I have an example about that. These are 2 lines of poetry that come from completely places and times. They both describe desperate love in amazingly close ways.
The first is a line of Arabic Poetry written by Ahmed Shawqy, a famous early 20th Century poet who was chosen by fellow poets as the 'Prince of Poets'. He says:
أنا لو ناديته في ذلة..هي ذي روحي خذها ما احتفى
It roughly translates: If I called her humbly, "here's my soul, take it", she wouldn't care.
The other line comes from a song for Celine Dion – the most famous Canadian on Earth. The song is called 'Amour ou Amitie' (there's an accent on the last e but it would take me some time to find it, but you know I could have spent the time writing all that sentence in finding the accent, so you know what…I'll rewrite the name with its accent)
The song is called 'Amour ou Amitié' and the line says (and let's hope we don't pump into other accents or we will not finish today. This is my favourite thing about the English language, that you don't have any dashes or dots dancing around letters). So I was saying that the line goes:
Moi, Je l'aime et je peux lui offrir ma vie, meme s'il ne veut pas de ma vie.
It translates – also roughly - : Me, I love him and I'm willing to offer him my life, even if he doesn't want my life.
Pretty amazing! The writers are 9 decades and a couple of thousand kilometers apart, and yet they come up with quite close expression of the same sentiment.
Now you may be asking why I wrote the blog in English not in French or Arabic; the languages from which I cited.
I could have written in Arabic my mother tongue or in French (though I'd go bananas at the end of it as I consult the dictionary like 100min to check if a word is masculine or feminine).
Well, I tell you' Come on! This is the lingua franca and thus it rules.
And let's admit it. You wouldn't be reading now if you found the blog in a language other than English (assuming of course that there's still someone who could put up with the blog till this point). So to those braves ones who are still reading, I say: Goodbye Adieu سلام
