Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Godā Stuti, 19

tuṅgair akṛtrima-giraḥ svayam uttamāṅgaiḥ
yaṃ sarva-gandha iti sādaram udvahanti |
āmodam anyam adhigacchati mālikābhiḥ
so ’pi tvadīya-kuṭilāḷaka-vāsitābhiḥ || 19 ||

Even He

        whom the Vedas
                their words being entirely natural
        reverentially declare through their lofty heads [the Upaniṣads]
        to be the Fragrance of All Things

acquires an additional perfume

        through the flowers
                made fragrant by Your curled locks!

Notes
While I was able to translate this verse, I needed Brain Snacks to figure out that the agents of the first two padas are the Vedas and that their heads (literally their "best limbs") are the Upaniṣads. Śrīvaiṣṇava thought is similar to Pūrva Mīmāṃsā in that both believe that the Vedas are not composed by anybody, not even God (whereas the Naiyāyikas believe that God composed the Vedas); the word akṛtrima here, which I've translated as "entirely natural", means something more like "unmanufactured", in both senses: they are not produced by the toil of somebody's hands; and they are not fabricated and cooked up, but true and natural in a most fundamental way.

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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”