Her eyes are bleary with sleeplessness. She “watches over” stars all night as if she were a shepherd and they her flock. She hardly bothers to dress herself other than in tatters. Arabian poet Al-Khansā’ (d. 645 AD) starts to reveal in the third line of her famous elegy why she’s distraught and unkempt.

For I had heard — and it was not news to rejoice me — one making report, who had come repeating intelligence, […] (1)

Recently something came clear to me about the line. Here’s my transliteration of the Arabic text:

3 wa-qad sami^tu wa-lam ‘abjaḥ bi-hi ẖabar(an) | muḥaddiṯ(an) jā’a yanmī raj^(a) ‘aẖbār(i) 

I had read ẖabar(an), an undefined Form 1 verbal noun in accusative case, and muḥaddiṯ(an), an undefined Form 2 active participle in accusative case, as being in a noun-adjective relationship to one another. The structure didn’t cohere, though.

It dawned on me lately that ẖabar(an) is an adverb affiliated with the verbal phrase preceding it — lam ‘abjaḥ bi-hi (lit. “not I found joy with it”). Muḥaddiṯ(an) is the sole direct object of the verb sami^tu, as well as subject of the 3rd-person-masculine-singular verbs jā’a (“he came”) and yanmī (2).

Here’s my translation:

For I had heard — and got no joy in it as tiding — a speaker (who) came yielding increase (of) the coming back of reports, […]

It’s clumsy but suits my present mode of study, which is to render texts as closely to the Arabic as I can while preserving legible English.

Notes
(1) Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students, Cambridge University, 1965, p. 39.
(2) Verb yanmī (root n-m-y) has a wide range of modern meanings in Wehr. I will go with Lane’s “yielding increase,” which can suggest repetition. The gist is clear enough: A report being carried by someone is propagated through repetition.

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