topics: |  poetry | sanskrit

A translation in verse of 99 poems, without source or references.  The
translations are rather cavalier about the original text.

Excerpts

verse III, p.25

Girls with the startled eyes of forest deer,
And fluttering hands that drip
With sandal-water; bathing-halls with clear
Deep pools to float and dip ;

The light moon blown across the shadowy hours,
Cool winds, and odorous flowers.
And the high terraced roof - all things enhance
In Summer love's sweet trance.

---
appears as verse 98 in Barbara Stoler Miller's Bhartrihari: poems:

	Women bathed in sandalwood scents,
	Flashing antelope-eyes,
	Arbors of fountains, flowers,
	And moonlight,
	A terrace swept with breezes
	Of flowering jasmine —
	These are summer's fan
	For passion's flame and kAma's

verse V, p.27

This Winter gale will play the gallant lover,
And meeting careless girls
Will pluck their gowns, and with rude fingers  hover
Among their tangled curls.

He '11 kiss their eyelids too, their cheeks caress
Till they are all a-tremble ;
He '11 tease their lips till murmurs soft confess
The love they would dissemble.

appears as verse 145 in Barbara Stoler Miller's Bhartrihari: poems:

	Unloosing their hair,
	Pressing closed their eyes,
	Pulling at their garments,,
	Exciting chills on their flesh,
	Destroying their demeanor,
	Biting their lips
	Until great sighs confess their love;
	The wind in winter is a lusty lover
	Of beautiful women.

verse X, p.33

My love within a forest walked alone,
All in a moonlit dale ;
And here awhile she rested, weary grown.
And from her shoulders threw the wimpled veil
To court the little gale.

I peering through the thicket saw it all.
The yellow moonbeams fall,
I saw them mirrored from her bosom fly
Back to the moon on high.

---
original text with gloss:

viShramya viShramya vanadrumAnAm     [wandering wandering of forest trees]
   chAyAsu tanvI vicacAra kAcit      [in shadows slender woman roamed once]
stanottarIvena karoddhretena         [with a breast-cloth held in hand]
   nivarayanti SaSino mayUkhAn       [warding off moon's rays.]

verse 121 in Barbara Stoler Miller's Bhartrihari: poems:

	A certain slender woman was wandering seeking
	solace in shadows of forest trees
	warding off moon's scorching rays
	with the silken shawl held by her hand.

Note the intrusion of the "I" in More's version; and also the many
(unnecessary) elaborations.

verse XXX, p.52

	Lightly an ignorant boor is made content.
	And lightlier yet a sage ;
	But minds by half-way knowledge warped and bent,
	Not Brahma's self their fury may assuage.

---
appears as verse 8 in Barbara Stoler Miller's Bhartrihari: poems:

An ignorant man is readily pleased,
More readily yet is a sage
But a man distorted by trifling knowledge,
Brahma himself cannot sway.

[JM Kennedy (1913) gives this verse as nitI-shataka 3, with this prose
translation:

	The fundamentally ignorant man is
	easily led, and the wise man still more
	easily ; but not even the Almighty Himself
	can exercise any influence on the smatterer.
		 (The Satakas: Or, Wise Sayings of Bhartrihari)

verse XLVIII p.71

An old man bald as a copper pot,
Because one noon his head grew hot.
Crawled to a spreading bilva-tree
To seek the shade. By Fate's decree
A fruit just then came tumbling down.
And cracked the old man's brittle crown
With loud explosion - which was worse.
Ill dogs us everywhere when Fate 's averse.

verse 39 in Barbara Stoler Miller's Bhartrihari: poems:

	A bald-headed man, his pate
	Pained by the rays of the sun,
	Desiring a shady spot,
	Went by fate to the foot
	Of a wood-apple tree.
	Alas, there his head
	Was smashed by a large
	Falling fruit.
	Verily,
	Where goes a man deserted by fortune,
	There do adversities follow him.

Greg Bailey's version, from Love Lyrics (Clay Sanskrit Library):

   A bald-headed man,
   his head scorched by the sun's rays,
   Hastening to a shady spot,
   Stood at the foot of a palm tree.
   And there, by a large falling fruit
   His head was split open with a crack.
   Generally, where the victim of fate goes
   There disasters follow him.  (p.71)