Just a place to jot down my musings.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Godā Stuti, 23

arcyaṃ samarcya niyamair nigama-prasūnaiḥ
nāthaṃ tvayā kamalayā ca sameyivāṃsam |
mātaś ciraṃ niraviśan nijam ādhirājyaṃ
mānyā manu-prabhṛtayo ’pi mahīkṣitas te || 23 ||

Only after having worshipped 
        the Lord
                worthy of worship
                always accompanied by You and Lakṣmī
according to injunctions that are Vedic blossoms,

o Mother!

did even venerable ones like Manu
        lords of the earth
long enjoy their own reigns.

Notes
This is not a very difficult verse, except for the word sameyivāṃsam, which threw me off for a while. Logic suggests that it should be an adjective (related to √samē, to come together, which may or may not be connected to the root √ī, to go, etc.) that modifies nātham. This suggests that this is in fact one of the rare participles formed with -i-vāṃs from the perfect (liṭ) of the root √same. The -y- in the form is probably a case of epenthesis. Since the perfect is technically used only for the distant past (parokṣa-bhūte liṭ), I've translated this as "always accompanied", to convey some sense of temporal expansiveness.

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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”