Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Godā Stuti, 28

śatamakha-maṇi-nīlā cāru-kalhāra-hastā
stana-bhara-namitāṅgī sāndra-vātsalya-sindhuḥ |
aḷaka-vinihitābhiḥ sragbhir ākṛṣṭa-nāthā
vilasatu hṛdi Godā Viṣṇucittātmajā naḥ || 28 ||

        Her hue as blue as the sapphire hue of Indra, performer of a hundred oblations;
        Her hands as beautiful as the beautiful white water-lily
        Her body slightly bowed from the weight of Her bosom,

        A brimming ocean of motherly love,
                whose Lord was attracted by the garlands
                        worn on Her locks

May Godā
        born to Viṣṇucitta
delight us in our hearts!

Notes
The meter now switches to Mālinī (x x x x x x — — / — x — — x — —) as the stotram approaches its conclusion. Furthermore, the voice of the verse changes from the second person to the third person, suggesting that this verse is the dhyāna śloka, a verse describing the person of Godā for meditative purposes.
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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”