Just a place to jot down my musings.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Godā Stuti, 15

āmodavaty api sadā hṛdayaṃ-gamā ’pi
rāgānvitā ’pi laḷitā ’pi guṇottarā ’pi |
mauḷi-srajā tava Mukunda-kirīṭa-bhājā
Gode bhavaty adharitā khalu vaijayantī || 15 ||


        Though fragrant,
        Though always residing on [Mukunda's] chest,
        Though filled with passionate love,
        Though beautiful,
        Though possessing excellent virtues,

the Vaijayantī garland
is inferior, 

O Godā,

to Your crown-garland
        which adorns Mukunda's crown!

Notes
I'm having some difficulty with the grammar of this verse, and will have to return to it at some point to fix it (both the syntax and the meaning).


<UPDATE>
The primary difficulty I faced with this verse was that the first two padas are adjectives that can construe with the substantives in both the third pada (i.e., [tava] mauḷi-srajā) and the fourth pada (i.e., vaijayantī). I looked up Brain Snacks, which pointed out that these adjectives are in fact meant to go with both, albeit with different meanings. Here is Round 2:

O Godā,
Your crown-garland,
        being a source of delight,
        always attractive,
        filled with passion,
        graceful,
        endowed with excellent qualities,
has become Mukunda's crown's adornment,
while the Vaijayantī garland,
        though fragrant,
        though always residing on [Mukunda's] chest,
        though filled with redness,
        though beautiful,
        though possessing excellent virtues,
has been bested.


This is still not satisfactory because I've had to repeat every adjective twice in the English version whereas they appear but once in the Sanskrit original, but at least it's a fuller translation than my first version.

And as an aside, here is Apte's set of meanings for the word laḷita (excluding the examples he cites from Sanskrit kāvya):
lalita
[1] Playing, sporting, dallying. 
[2] Amorous, sportive, wanton, voluptuous; 
[3] Lovely, beautiful, handsome, elegant, graceful; 
[4] Pleasing, charming, agreeable, fine; 
[5] Desired. 
[6] Soft, gentle; 
[7] Tremulous, trembling. 
lalitaḥ 
[1] N. of a musical scale. 
[2] A particular position of hands in dancing. 
lalitam 
[1] Sport, dalliance, play. 
[2] Amorous pastime, gracefulness of gait; any languid or amorous gesture in a woman; 
[3] Beuaty [sic], grace, charm. 
[4] Any natural or artless act; 
[5] Simplicity, innocence.
lalitā 
[1] A woman (in general). 
[2] A wanton woman. 
[3] Musk. 
[4] A form of Durgā. -
[5] N. of various metres. -
[6] A kind of mūrchanā, also rāga.

<UPDATE>

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