Brain making weird connections again
Once I was a scholar, and learned Classical Tibetan, among other languages. Now our teacher was a very fine scholar and gave us a bit of poetry by the famous sixth Dalai Lama to translate, when we'd had about a year of Classical Tibetan.
In four wel-formed lines, this poem expressed the essential dichotomy between his day and his night life, between his exalted and his debased personality. (And, this being Buddhism, there's an argument to be made for connecting the two back to front: where exaltedness exceeds it becomes depravity and where depravity exceeds, it becomes exaltedness. Or something like that, I'm no longer as deeply into Buddhism as I once was.)
And somehow, inexplicably, I have been thinking of this poem all week long, when I was working on getting Krita ready for the freeze at night, and learning how to work with Java Studio Creator (new! hot! Visual Basic 3.0 for Web Applications! Only more complex, with Java and not as stable!) It's strange how man's mind works...
But back to Tsangyang Gyatso. An accurate translation is not suitable for a public web page, especially the last line would sound like a spammer's favourite subject line:
po ta la ru bzhugs dus
rig 'dzin tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho
lha sa zhol du sdod dus
'chal po dvangs bzang dbang po
Even someone who doesn't know any Tibetan should recognize the first word (three syllables) of the first line, and the first word (two syllables) of the second line.
A loose translation in English:
In the Potala Palace
I am Rigdzin Tsangyang Gyatso
But in downton Lhasa,
I'm Dangzang Wangpo.
Now, where did I put my Dutch translation? It must be somewhere on the hard disk of my first laptop, or maybe on an old floppy... I've forgotten what Rigdzin Tsangyang Gyatso means. Something laudable, I'm sure.
But the old font I used when writing Tibetan in Word 2 is still available. The encoding is fantasy, and I made the font with CorelDraw.
/thoughts | permanent link | |