Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Incredibly beautiful

I don't have words to express how beautiful I find this. So calm, serene, soothing, uplifting. And the music too!


I was half-expecting Elrond to come riding out of the mist. Take a few minutes out of your day and watch this, full screen, headphones on, cellphones off. Truly stunning.

<UPDATED>
I found the words sung in Stelka Sabotinova's haunting voice here:




Притури се планината,
та затрупа два овчера.
Два овчера, два другаря.

Проговаря планината:
Ой ви вази два овчера.
либе жали ден до пладне,
майка жали чак до гроба.

Transliterated:

Prituri se planinata,
(ta) zatrupya dva ovchera
dva ovchera, dva drugarya.

Progovarya planinata:
Oy vi vazi dva ovchera.
(Libe) zhali den to pladne,
Mayka zhali chak do groba.



</UPDATED>
Posted by at 4:36 PM
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Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shiraz" ghazal 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”