Wednesday 12 November 2014

2 quatrains from Ghalib's 164


Notoriously, eyes devil, notarising deals in pupillage to such imps
The heart is the sole bidder on what, heartless, it yet pimps
& for veiled by but worship are yearning's futile arrows
 See, Abraha's elephants scattered again by sparrows

As before, at its own ease, an eternal heart is ill
Having no wound to tease more mortal till
Nails itch to pluck out like a tick
Bach's vernal pump of the tulip's ilk

Envoi-                                            
Sardar! Selflessness, to Synteresis, is never naked because
Like V.P, Hypokiemenon too deserves applause.

Notes-
1) The relevant couplets, extracted in reverse order out of Ghalib's ghazal, which underlie the translation given above are-
chashm dallāl-e jins-e rusvāʾī
dil ḳharīdār-e żauq-e ḳhvārī hai
qiblah-e maqṣad-e nigāh-e niyāz
phir vuhī pardah-e ʿamārī hai

phir kuchh ik dil ko beqarārī hai
sīnah jūyā-e zaḳhm-e kārī hai
phir jigar khodne lagā nāḳhun
āmad-e faṣl-e lālah-kārī hai

be-ḳhvudī be-sabab nahīñ ġhālib
kuchh to hai jis kī pardah-dārī hai
See Prof. Frances Pritchett's divine 'desertful of roses' website for Urdu text and expert commentary.

2) TULIP is an acronym for the following doctrines: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints.
J.S Bach, 'the fifth Evangelist', gives us, in his 1725 Spring cantatas, an auditory homology of pre-Lutheran synteresis (or Luther's own notion of it as not intrinsic but an adornment), thus re-establishing Music's ongoing descent from David as a fractal tropological prefiguring of its own otherwise teratological performance of John 21-25,  such that, of those unwritten volumes too vast for the Universe, we too can affirm what Neitzche said of the St. Matthew's Passion- '"One who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as gospel."

3) Abraha, a Christian Ethiopian, came to conquer the Ka'aba, during the time of idolatry, with an army of elephants. This invasion was repelled by little birds which flung clods of earth from their beaks.

4) V.P Menon was a humbly born bureaucrat who laid the ground-work for the great Sardar Vallabhai Patel's successful integration of the Princely States into the Indian Union.

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