Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Godā Stuti, 8

bhoktuṃ tava priyatamaṃ bhavatīva Gode
bhaktiṃ nijāṃ praṇaya-bhāvanayā gṛṇantaḥ |
uccāvacair viraha-saṅgamajair udantaiḥ
śṛṅgārayanti hṛdayaṃ guravas tvadīyāḥ || 8 ||


To enjoy Your Beloved
the way You do, Godā,

Your elders

        singing their own devotion
                with feelings of fondness and reverence

adorn their hearts
        with a variety of tales
                born from union and separation.

Notes
The "elders" here undoubtedly refer to the other Ālvārs, the saints of the Śrīvaīṣṇava tradition. Śrī Vedānta Deśika refers here to Godā's unique position among the Ālvārs, as the only female and as the only saint who is apotheosized into an actual consort of Viṣṇu. Thus, while she would seem to occupy a lower social position than many of the other Ālvārs by virtue of being a young girl, she has achieved something greater by becoming the bride of God, so to speak. Thus, Śrī Deśika claims in this verse, the other Ālvārs, who sang sincerely of their own feelings of love for God, made use of the emotions of śṛṅgāra, routinely but (in my opinion) crudely translated into English as "erotic sentiment". For Godā, though, this mode was the entirely natural way of singing her devotion for God.

It is also worth noting that in Sanskrit literary theory, śṛṅgāra is described as existing in two modes, vipralambha-śṛṅgāra (aestheticized love-in-separation) and saṃbhoga-śṛṅgāra (aestheticized love-in-union). Godā sings extensively in both modes in her Nācciyār Tirumoli

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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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What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”