Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

O Khayyām!

I just discovered this pretty cool site called Exploring Khayyam that has translations and originals for the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, and I'm very excited! One for today:

آن قصر که بهرام درو جام گرفت / روبه بچه کرد و شیر آرام گرفت
بهرام که گور می‌گرفتی دائم / امروز نگر که گور بهرام گرفت

Time is not kind to hubris. Or to most other things, really.

<UPDATE>
This verse being a robā`ī, every hemistich has to be a variant of the same general metrical pattern—in this case, hazaj muthamman akhrab (هزج مثمّن اخرب). The meters for the individual hemistichs are (according to Prof. Frances Pritchett's wonderful meter handbook):
1) hazaj muthamman akhrab makfūf majbūb
2) hazaj muthamman akhrab maqbūz makfūf majbūb
3) hazaj muthamman akhrab maqbūz abtar
4) hazaj muthamman akhrab maqbūz makfūf majbūb

Or in terms of the actual feet (where is long and x is short):
— — x / x — — x / x — — x / x —
— — x / x — x — / x — — x / x —
— — x / x — x — / x — — — / —
— — x / x — x — / x — — x / x —

The third hemistich is the only one in which the final x x — pattern is replaced by the — — pattern.
</UPDATE>

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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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What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”