Just a place to jot down my musings.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Godā Stuti, 29

iti vikasita-bhakter utthitāṃ veṅkaṭeśāt
bahuguṇa-ramaṇīyāṃ vakti Godā-stutiṃ yaḥ |
sa bhavati bahumānyaḥ śrīmato raṅga-bhartuḥ
caraṇa-kamala-sevāṃ śāśvatīm abhyupaiṣan || 29 ||

Whoever recites this praise-song of Godā
        delightful through its many virtues
        sprung up from Veṅkaṭeśa
                whose devotion has flowered thus

He,
        attaining the eternal service
                of the lotus-feet
                        of the Lord of Śrīraṅgam
                        endowed with Śrī,
becomes greatly revered!

Notes
This is the final verse of the Godā Stuti, the phala-śruti or the recitation of the fruits (of reciting the stuti). This particular phala-śruti closely echoes the phala-śruti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika's Śrī Stuti, another beautiful poem in praise of Śrī Lakṣmī. That verse, also in the Mālinī meter, begins upacita-guru-bhakter utthitaṃ veṅkaṭeśāt, meaning "[the praise-poem] sprung up from Veṅkaṭeśa, whose great devotion has grown".

|| iti Śrī Godā Stutiḥ ||

With this is completed the Godā Stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika. Just as it is customary to precede the recitation of his works with the recitation of a laudatory verse, it is customary to follow the recitation of his work with another laudatory verse to him, also composed by his son Kumāra Varadācārya:

Salutations to

        the lion among poets and philosophers
                resplendent with illustrious auspicious virtues
        the noble Veṅkaṭeśa
                endowed with śrī
        teacher of the Vedānta!

kavi-tārkika-siṃhāya kalyāṇa-guṇa-śāline |
śrīmate veṅkaṭeśāya vedānta-gurave namaḥ ||

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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”