Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Godā Stuti, 4

kṛṣṇānvayena dadhatīṃ yamunānubhāvaṃ
tīrthair yathāvad avagāhya sarasvatīṃ te |
Gode vikasvara-dhiyāṃ bhavatī-kaṭākṣāt
vācaḥ sphuranti makaranda-mucaḥ kavīnām || 4 ||



<DRAFT>
Diving correctly 
        at sacred fords / with the holy teachers

into 
        Your Sarasvatī / Your stream of language 

        which possesses the splendor of the Yamunā
                through its association with Kṛṣṇa

Goda!
    by Your glance,

the words,
        oozing honey,
of poets,
        their intellect opened,
shine forth.
</DRAFT>


Notes
I still haven't figured out how this verse works. Thanks to Brain Snacks I know now that there is śleṣa (paronomasia) going on, but I'm still trying to get it all to cohere meaningfully. I have the third and fourth padas down, but connecting the first two to the third and fourth has been difficult. This is what I have for now, and I'll work on it over the course of the month.

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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”