For Duchess Kaylah the Cheerful upon her Elevation to the
Order of the Pelican
By TH Laird Colyne Stewart, Feb AS 51 (2017)
Serving is a calling sloth
is retreating before it ·
Study of noblesse the
serious woman is knowing
Based on “The Mongolian
Poem of Muhammad al-Samarqandi” (1290s), which, in English, reads:
Knowledge is an ocean,
the jewel retreats before it, the law of knowledge, the wise man knows
In the original
Mongolian, the poem consists of four verses. The first, third and fourth verses
alliterated with other. As well, the verb endings repeated in the first, second
and fourth verses. I have imitated this by alliterating the letter S (the fact
that the second verse also alliterates is either an added bonus or a failure on
my part to adhere to the original) and by having three verbs ending in “ing”. The
only punctuation in the original was a single dot between the first two verses
and the last two (which I have also done).
Just as the original
poet (who was Persian) wrote of a culture other than his own, do I write of a
household not my own (which also allows me to mimic the original poem’s title).
Sources
The Poem of Muhammad al-Samarqandi, http://www.linguamongolia.com/Muhammad%20al-Samarqandi.pdf
De Rachewiltz, Igor. “The Mongolian Poem of Muhammad
al-Samarqandī
,” Central Asiatic Journal,
Vol. 12, No. 4 (1969), pp. 280-285, Published by: Harrassowitz Verlag. Stable
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41926793
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