Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Stunning nature

Phytoplankton bloom off the Chatham Islands, to the east of New Zealand. 


Image taken from NASA's Earth Observatory page.

And here is a much larger version of the same image, with far greater detail. Truly gorgeous, a glimpse into the wondrous forces that govern our world—atmospheric, oceanic, geological, and biological.




Posted by at 6:36 PM
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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!

About Me

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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”