Just a place to jot down my musings.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Verses to enjoy

One from Sa`dī's گلستان :

بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکر اند \ که در آفرینش ز یک گوهر اند
چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار \ دگر عضوها را نماند قرار
تو کز محنت دیگران بی‌غمی \ نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

Loosely translated:
"The children of Man are limbs of one body, for in creation they are of one essence /
When life brings pain to one limb, the other limbs cannot maintain their stability /
You, who feel no sorrow from others' sufferings, surely don't deserve the name 'man'."

And on the same theme in Sanskrit:
ayam bandhuḥ paro vêti gaṇanā laghu-cetasām
puṃsām udāra-cittānāṃ vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam

"The small-minded think, 'This one's a kinsman, that one's an outsider' /
For the noble-minded, the world itself is family."

While the broad sentiment expressed in these two verses is the same, there is an important difference: for Sa`dī, it simply is true as a matter of fact that all human beings share a common essence, and someone who lacks compassion is simply not a human being—s/he lacks humanity. In the Sanskrit verse, on the other hand, the conventional manner of dividing up the world into "ours" and "others" is described merely as "small-minded". (Of course, the idea that humans are limbs of one body is also present in Vedic literature in the famous Puruṣa Sūkta, but that image is commonly used to organize humans into a social or moral hierarchy, depending on your reading.)

1 comment:

  1. The verse by Sa'adi is inscribed at the UN building in New York.

    ReplyDelete

Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”