Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

More stunning nature

I cannot communicate the experience of seeing the entire sky over Lake Þingvallavatn light up over and over again as wave upon wave of green and orange light washed over it, illuminating not just sky but also lake and shoreline. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the actual experience is worth many thousands of pictures (or videos)!





This beautiful time-lapse sequence depicts the aurora borealis over the Norwegian city of Tromsø. Not quite the same as being there, but it will have to do!


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