annotated translation - thee thee e magey (dhivehi song)
you - you are my
most desired
my heart, and within it
my soul, is true to you
if i were to tell you the extent of my love
would that be wrong of me?[1][x]
be the one to come to me[x]
the night has gotten late
make your choice, come to me[2]
the night is brightening[3][4]
i can't possibly fall asleep
if you don't come to me tonight
how much my heart has to bear
is why sleep offends me[6]
if i tell you the extent of my longing[7]
are you willing to give it all to me?
(man)
my luck and fortune is what you are to me
ask me, my love
i feel compelled to call you the moon[8]
and embrace you with love
(woman)
i would die, i'm certain
to lie, joyful, in your arms
on my eyes and my face, lovingly
with a smile, plant your kisses
(woman)
i swear on this, i'll say it now
don't be far from me anymore
i could love you so completely that i would
put on a shroud and step into the earth
(man)
please, beloved, steal away
my spirit and my soul
now, i cant know happiness
unless i see you smiling
(duet)
[bridge]
i can't possibly fall asleep
if you don't come to me tonight
[1] could also be translated as something like “would i be doing you wrong?”. the subtlety is this idea of “would the full extent of my love scare you / pressure you / be too much to ask?”
[2] “be the one to come to me / make your choice, come to me” lines are actually the same line repeated in the dhivehi version. the literal translation of the two words would be “come to me” and “take the lead / take initiative”
[x] in general i find this to be a good example of intentionality and the difference between poetry as an art versus how people often seem to view poetry as just writing out sentimentality. pure sentimentality would be much less interesting than a lot of the decisions made here and i’ll look at a couple of examples where the way a regular person would complete a line in their heads as just the more kitsch sentimentality is different from how much more interesting and memorable and meaningful a line fitting that same musical scheme could be.
these two lines are examples to me of choices made in poetry and the difference between poets and everyday people. the cliche way that most people would autocomplete the last line of the bridge (after “if i were to tell you the extent of my love”) in their heads to fit the tune if they didn’t remember the actual lyrics would probably be something like “haadha beynun vevey” or “haadha loaiybeh vevey” (translates to something like “i want you so” or “i love you so”) and the cliché way a listener would autocomplete the first line to fit the tune would probably be something like “annaashey loabivaa” (translates to “come to me, my love”). both of these are vastly less interesting than the actual lines here.
the “autocomplete” choice are generic sentiments that aren’t memorable or poignant and would be relying on the music or singing to be what makes the song memorable. the actual choices in both lines are what makes the song memorable and interesting, because rather than a generic love song where the content is just “i love them so much (in various terms)”, it now has a lot more complex emotions to it.
you feel so strongly for someone that it even scares you a little and you’re worried it might scare them too; you’re worried that if you told them just how overwhelming your feelings were it wouldn’t be fair to put it on them (because if someone learns they have your whole emotional state in their hands they might feel pressure or obligation to not devastate you); you’re worried that you can’t know how much they love you if you can’t be sure they didn’t just feel duty or obligation. so “would that be wrong of me?” segueing right into “choose to come to me”, to say you want them to actively choose you of their own free will first. you want to know that if all you said was something as small as just that it’s getting late and you’re having trouble sleeping without them around, they’d take it seriously and come to you. even without them knowing how strongly you feel, just because they want to be around you.
i think this ends up being much more romantic and emotionally weighty than just the sentimental cliches would have been. i don’t know if the reasons for the song’s popularity include people thinking particularly intensely about the lyrics, but i do think that its popularity is likely because the feelings in it resonate a lot more with people than the same music and vocals with more cliché lyrics would have. in particular, i think those worries are a very timeless feeling and even something any young person today has probably felt and dwelled on. having it in writing in a song seems way ahead of its time for 1995 but it doesn’t surprise me that it’s gotten this popular even in the 2020s (around 143k plays on youtube for the karaoke version uploaded in 2020, which is a lot for a country and language with only around 350k speakers, even with how little a lot of younger people generally consume dhivehi-language content)
[3] those two lines are repeated in the original dhivehi, so translating them differently here is a translation choice. on one hand, keeping them identical would keep the rhyming aspect of the original, especially since it’s a song. i chose to translate i felt like the repetition even in the repeated lines gave a slightly different connotation because imploring someone to take the lead make the choice actively come to you once and asking it again are slightly different, especially in the context of the rest of the verses which is about wanting them to choose to come to you without being pushed. so the repetition has more vulnerability because she’s putting herself out there by asking repeatedly even while worrying that learning the full extent of her love might scare him and wanting him to choose for himself to come to her and to understand what she means even if she were to just tell him “it’s late and i can’t sleep”
[4] for "the night has gotten late / the night is brightening". the phrase there literally translated would be something like "the night is so late now (usually implying like past 1am ish in colloquial understanding)" and the stem of the word for getting late comes from the specific time of night right before dawn.
[5] from the way it’s sung, this also seems like a double entendre with an almost-homonym in pronunciation (“dhan” and “dhon”) for “time of night right before dawn” and “light / bright”. the full word also could mean “ripening”, so there is a colloquial connotation of late night after the rest of the world has fallen asleep, the literal meaning of “dawn is approaching”, and homonyms for both “the night is getting lighter/brighter” and “the night is ripening / coming into fruition” (other ways to say dawn is approaching). i’m unfamiliar with whether this is a common device in dhivehi poetry but since my familiarity with use of phonetic double entendre to have further layers of meaning is common in rap so i assume it is
[6] maybe the more conventional translation would be something like “sleep eludes me” or “sleep escapes me”, and a literal translation of the exact word i translated as “offends” would be closer to “bores” or a milder version of “disgusts”. i chose to go with “sleep offends me” to try capture both possible meanings of the double entendre in one word while sticking closer to the overall theme of restlessness and frustration about the idea of falling to sleep when he hasn’t come to her yet and the nervousness of how him choosing to come to her would ease her worries about how he feels
[7] in the original version, the same phrasing for “how much” is used in the first and third lines to have an internal rhyme and repetition. a translation that keeps that repetition could be something like “if i tell you how much i love you”. but once again, translating coming with trade-offs between being technically accurate, preserving the structure or rhyme, and preserving the meaning or theme, i have erred on the side of trying to keep my understanding of the meaning or theme and connotations here. a main theme throughout the song is yearning and i felt this most accurately kept the spirit of yearning.
[8] could be more literally “i want you call you the moon” or “i want to call you my moon”, but i think the spirit here is the feeling of being swept away by feeling. that you feel so strongly you feel the urge to wax poetic, so i went with “i feel compelled to…”. as for deciding between “my moon” or “the moon”, the first line here is a metaphor of him seeing her as his luck or fortune, which is like a force of nature or a force of the universe that he feels blessed by, rather than the metaphor being something he owns or possesses. so i choose “the moon” as a translation, for it to be another force of nature and the universe (especially one that also traditionally and literarily has a lot of spiritual power and meaning) instead of it being possessive
