Just a place to jot down my musings.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Godā Stuti, 17

viśvāyamāna-rajasā kamalena nābhau
vakṣaḥ-sthale ca kamalā-stana-candanena |
āmodito ’pi nigamair vibhur aṅghri-yugme
dhatte natena śirasā tava mauḷi-mālām || 17 ||

The Supreme Lord,

        although delighted

                by the lotus—
                        whose pollen becomes the very cosmos—
                in His navel,

                by the sandalwood of Kamalā's [Lakṣmī's] bosom
                on His chest,

                by the Vedas
                in His divine feet,

wears
        with bowed head
your crown-garland!


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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”