Just a place to jot down my musings.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Godā Stuti, 26

raṅge taṭid-guṇavato ramayaiva Gode
kṛṣṇāmbudasya ghaṭitāṃ kṛpayā suvṛṣṭyā |
daurgatya-durviṣa-vināśa-sudhā-nadīṃ tvāṃ
santaḥ prapadya śamayanty acireṇa tāpān || 26 ||


Good people,

o Godā,

surrender to You,
        a river of nectar
        which destroys the vile poison
                of evil conduct

        descending

        along with Lakṣmī
                a bountiful rain
                of compassion

        from the black Kṛṣṇa-cloud
                on the shores of Śrīraṅgam,
                endowed with the virtues of lightning,


and immediately quench
their burning suffering.

Notes
I was unable to translate the word taṭit until I looked up Brain Snacks, which used the word taḍit instead, meaning lightning. This, I think, works very well here, fitting in well with the cloud, rain, and river imagery.

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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”