Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Godā Stuti, 7

valmīkataḥ śravaṇato vasudhātmanas te
jāto babhūva sa muniḥ kavi-sārvabhaumaḥ |
Gode kim adbhutam idaṃ yad amī svadante
vaktrāravinda-makaranda-nibhāḥ prabandhāḥ || 7 ||


<UPDATED>
Born from an ant-hill, 
        the ear of the earth
                which is your very essence
that seer became lord of all poets;

Goda!

What wonder is it then, 
that these compositions
        like the honey from the lotus of Your face
taste so sweet!
</UPDATED>

Notes
The "lord of all poets"is Vālmīki, who meditated for so long that he was covered by ant-hills. I am not sure why an ant-hill is the "ear of the earth", but the point of the verse is clear: if Vālmīki, born merely from the ear of the earth, created the Rāmāyaṇa, then a fortiori how much greater should the works of Godā (the Tiruppāvai and the Nācciyār Tirumoli) be given that she is the very essence of the earth itself!



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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”