I pray that I may have before me songsters,
beside me tasteful poets from the South
and behind me girls whose graceful bracelets
jingle as they wave the flywhisk.
If this should be, be greedy, heart,
to taste the world.
If it, however, should not be,
then enter highest brahma.
UTPALARĀJA [BHARTṚHARI COLLECTION]
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, September 11, 2022
Prayer
An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara's "Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa" translated by Daniel H.H. Ingalls (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965 = Harvard Oriental Series, 44), pp. 421-422 (number 1605):