Just a place to jot down my musings.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Godā Stuti, 22

dūrvā-daḷa-pratimayā tava deha-kāntyā
go-rocanā rucirayā ca rucendirāyāḥ |
āsīd anujjhita-śikhā-vaḷa-kaṇṭha-śobhaṃ
māṅgalyadaṃ praṇamatāṃ Madhu-vairi-gātram || 22 ||

Bright green,
        from the radiance of Your body
                which resembles a blade of dūrvā grass,

bright yellow,
        from Lakṣmī's golden luster,

Madhu's Destroyer's body
        bestower of auspiciousness
                upon devotees

is brilliantly hued
        like the neck
                of a high-crested peacock.

Notes
Viṣṇu's body is typically described as possessing a very deep dark blue radiance, like that of a giant rain-cloud; here, that blue is combined with the bright yellow of Lakṣmī's radiance and the bright green of Godā's luster to produce the marvelously variegated colors of a peacock's neck. I'm not sure, however, where anujjhita, meaning "unabandoned" or "undischarged", fits in here, whether as a description of a peacock or of the colors of its neck.



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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”