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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