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.
Just a place to jot down my musings.
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Why pearls, and why strung at random?
In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shiraz" ghazal 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!
Blog Archive
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2010
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December
(30)
- Godā Stuti, 20
- Godā Stuti, 19
- Godā Stuti, 18
- Godā Stuti, 17
- The Ashes
- Godā Stuti, 16
- Godā Stuti, 15
- Godā Stuti, 14
- Godā Stuti, 13
- On freedom, choice(s), and democracy
- Godā Stuti, 12
- British architecture, urban planning, and decay
- The beautiful innocence of childhood
- Godā Stuti, 11
- Godā Stuti, 10
- Godā Stuti, 9
- Godā Stuti, 8
- Godā Stuti, 7
- More on truth and fiction and myth
- Godā Stuti, 6
- Godā Stuti, 5
- Godā Stuti, 4
- More stunning nature
- Stunning nature
- Godā Stuti, 3
- Godā Stuti, 2
- Godā Stuti, 1
- Godā Stuti
- True wisdom
- Vois Sur Ton Chemin (Look to Your Path)
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December
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About Me
- Gokul Madhavan
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”
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