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insubstantial shadow walking the distance between life and death. As
if hypnotized into a long interrupted reverie man lives out his
relatively short span of life, not knowing what days have in store for
him. He only wakes to the reality of death which suddenly and
unexpectedly overtakes him. Only when man breathes his last does he
realize, in a fleeting moment, that his life had been unreal and
nightmaris ll, and that he had been but "a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and is heard no more".
"Life", says Shakespeare, "is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing." This is the threshold of termination;
any more dictum or datum would certainly be a redundancy.
In his attempt to translate the concluding line of the original
Arabic poem, the translator stretches the average span of man's life on
earth over sixty years, a cqncept not unfolded in the original text.
He may have limited man's life-time on earth to "threescore years"
only to rhyme with "fears" in the third line. But even then, this
should not have encouraged the translator to take such an excessive
liberty in translating this line. "The light", which occurs at the end
of the second line, symbolizes the flashing moment of eternal truth
which engulfs a dying man. It antithesizes with "dark" in the first
line of the second stanza, and both synthesize into life in it
entirety. The verbal construction "bids us wake" makes clear that man
is tyrannized by death to which he has to succumb in utter
submissiveness whenever it comes. Like the Arabic text-originator, the
translator concludes his poem by stating that man, torn between life
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