Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Godā Stuti, 9

mātaḥ samutthitavatīm adhi Viṣṇucittaṃ
viśvopajīvyam amṛtaṃ vacasā duhānām |
tāpa-cchidaṃ hima-rucer iva mūrtim anyāṃ
santaḥ payodhi-duhituḥ sahajāṃ vidus tvām || 9 ||



Mother!

        The daughter of Viṣṇucitta;

        The extractor, through Her words,
        of the nectar
                that sustains the cosmos;

        The second manifestation, as it were,
        of the ice-rayed moon,
                destroying burning affliction;

        The sister of Lakṣmī, 
        Daughter of the Ocean of Milk—

Thus do saintly people know You.

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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!

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