TESTAMENTOS DO INFERNO

II.
O portón se abrirá pa dentro
y se feshará pa fora.
O país "do meio" otrora
É agora mui longe do centro.

The Gate will open toward the inside
and will be closed without.
The country that was once "of the middle"
is now very far out.

19 dezembro 2016

ॐ नमः शिवाय ॐ

JK/NKK 119
Who sleeps, and who is awake?
The water seeps from what lake?
What should be offered to Shiva in worship?
What supreme state may we reach?

JK/NKK 120
The mind sleeps and the higher Self is awake.
Water always seeps from Five Senses Lake.
We offer the water of Self-meditation.

Shiva-consciousness is the state to be reached.

I had already included these two vakhs in blog entries of 6 October 2016. Unfortunately, they were in separate entries, and in reverse order.

Lalla is here teaching us by asking riddles and then giving us the answers. My translations are quite accurate, so I'll let Lalla's words speak for themselves, even in translation. It is Lalla who is the teacher, not me.

A few words of explanation about this project are in order. First of all, the JK/NKK numbers refer to the numbering of Jayalal Kaul, who applied an interesting set of criteria to several hundred supposed "lalvakhs," in an effort to determine which were likely to have actually been written by her. In this way, he came up with a collection of 138 vakhs that he thought were probably genuine.

Jayalal Kaul's collection, with its numbering, was in turn adopted by Nil Kanth Kotru, in his 1989 book LAL DED, Her Life and Sayings. It was this book that convinced me that the current project was actually feasible. One of Kotru's innovations was to present Lalla's original texts in a modified system of Devanagari, which allowed him to represent all of Kashmiri's many vowels. Neither standard Devanagari nor the standard Perso-Arabic script can do this (nor can the Sharada script, in spite of some claims).

At any rate, I transliterated NKK's modified Devanagari (in which the diacritical marks were written in by hand) into a special romanization, which also represented all the vowels, but could be typed on a computer keyboard. When I publish my complete collection of translations of Lalla's vakhs, that romanized text will be included with each poem. The collection that I publish will likely include about 150 vakhs, since there are some from other sources that I accept as genuine. Typographical errors in NKK's Kashmiri text will also be corrected, so far as I am able to do that.

Lalla wrote in an old form of Kashmiri, which for speakers of modern English would be analogous to Chaucer's Middle English. She included a lot of Sanskrit words, which actually helps. Lalla's poems are the oldest surviving Kashmiri literature. So far as I know, there are no books to teach one how to understand Lalla's old form of Kashmiri. Lalla herself has been my teacher, through her poems. I always work from a Kashmiri text, also consulting other translators whose translations I have found to be literal enough to be of use. My finished translation is thus a kind of consensus as to the meaning of Lalla's Kashmiri, expressed in suitable English by a native speaker.

While I owe huge debts of gratitude to many people in the Kashmiri Pundit community, my most important help and teacher has been Lalla herself, and it is she that now drives the work forward.

ॐ नमः शिवाय ॐ

LALLA

It was your nudity
that first caused me
to notice you.
Now I see you
clothed, but your
soul cannot
be hidden.

We are children of
the same Father
and Mother,
speaking different
languages, yet
sister and brother.

We meet in dream
and we meet in mantra,
we meet in OM,
and in "namah Shivaya."

14 December 2016
ॐ नमः शिवाय ॐ

MEDITATION ON 11

MEDITATION ON 11

In what do I take refuge,
with so much doubt?
How can you say to me.
"bird, hill"
without explaining?
Am I to fly like a bird
to the mountain,
or fly like a mountain bird?
Or fly to my own hill?

When the foundations
have been thrown over,
what can the just do?

For the foundations
are destroyed--
what has the Righteous
One done?

If the foundations are destroyed
what has the righteous man accomplished?

quoniam quae perfecisti, destruxerunt

Because what you fashioned,
they destroyed,
but what did the righteous do?

If the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?

Quando fundamenta evertuntur,
justus quid facere valet?

For the laws are dissipated,
what has the just man done?

leges dissipatae sunt

There is so much doubt--
how is it to be
dissipated,
overturned,
destroyed?

The foundations
are a monument
to uncertainty.

December 12 2015, revised December 12 2016

OS TESTAMENTOS DO INFERNO

I.
Por qué te preocupas con el fin
si non comprendes o comesso.
A verdad é que el fin
y o principio son lo stesso.

Why do you concern yourself with the end
if you do not understand the beginning?
The truth is that the end
and the beginning are the same.

10 dizembro 2016

DEFENSIVE MANEUVER

I keep an agéd finger
on the young pulse
of my old country.
The symptoms are:
a turning-inward
that is "away from"
and not "toward,"
a disconnecting from
the outside world.
Likes and dislikes,
determined by long
habit, may no longer
fit.
There is confusion
and there is fear--
will isolation protect?
While other parts of
the world are
waking up,
my countrymen
have no more
attention to give.

O you, who call
yourself "America,"
are you sleeping,
or are you dying?

9 December 2016.

MACHINES

To work with computers,
one has to think like a computer,
to think like a machine.
It makes for a colder,
more lifeless world,
a world run
by machines.

We are programming
the defenses of dictators,
the logistics of fascists,
and the humor of maniacs.
We are designing the systems
of our surveillance,
and building the platforms
for our own hanging.

Thirty-five years ago
I laughed at a neo-Luddite.
Now I wonder
if it's too late.

8 Dec. 2016