Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Godā Stuti, 12

prāyeṇa Devi bhavatī-vyapadeśa-yogāt
godāvarī jagad idaṃ payasā punīte |
yasyāṃ sametya samayeṣu ciraṃ nivāsāt
bhāgīrathī-prabhṛtayo ’pi bhavanti puṇyāḥ || 12 ||


Lady,

The river Godāvarī

        in which rivers like the Gaṅgā dwell
        for long periods of time on sacred occasions
        in order to become pure

sanctifies this world with its waters

simply through its connection
        with Your name!

Notes
The river Ganges is, of course, considered the most sacred of rivers in Hindu thought. But here Śrī Vedānta Deśika claims that, simply by sharing its name with the goddess Godā, the river Godāvarī becomes so sanctified that Gaṅgā herself bathes in the Godāvarī in order to purify herself (of all the sins she takes from the humans who bathe in her waters).

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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”