Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Godā Stuti, 21

Raṅgeśvarasya tava ca praṇayānubandhāt
anyonya-mālya-parivṛttim abhiṣṭuvantaḥ |
vācālayanti vasudhe rasikās trilokīṃ
nyūnādhikatva-samatā-viṣayair vivādaiḥ || 21 ||

Extolling
        the exchange of garlands between you and the Lord of Śrīraṅgam,
                which arises from the loving relationship between You Two,

Your devotees on earth
        people of taste
make the Triple Worlds debate noisily
        whether You are superior or inferior to Him, or
        whether You are equals!

Notes
Such debates are clearly not new to Śrī Vedānta Deśika! The point here, though, seems to be that such noisy debates, although not unimportant, simply miss what is most germane: the celebration of transcendental love, which is what underlies the entire cosmos.
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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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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”