Just a place to jot down my musings.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Godā Stuti, 16

tvan-mauḷi-dāmani vibhoḥ śirasā gṛhīte
sva-cchanda-kalpita-sapīti-rasa-pramodāḥ |
mañju-svanā madhu-liho vidadhuḥ svayaṃ te
svāyaṃvaraṃ kam api maṅgaḷa-tūrya-ghoṣam || 16 ||

Nectar-sipping honeybees,

        delighted by drinking nectar as they please

                in Your crown-garland,
                        obtained by the head
                                of the All-Pervading Lord,

        making melodious sounds,

themselves arrange 
        Your marvelous marriage
                as if resounding with the auspicious music of instruments!

Notes
More on the marvel of Godā's garland. In this verse, the bees that earlier migrated from Viṣṇu's Vaijayantī garland and formed a canopy over His head are described as being so pleased by drinking the nectar of Godā's garland that their satisfied buzzing produces all the auspicious sounds associated with the marriage ceremony (such as the nādasvaram). I'm not too happy with the way this verse flows in English, though, and will have to fix it at some point.

No comments:

Post a Comment

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!

About Me

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