Читать книгу A Digit of the Moon - Bain Francis William - Страница 1

The better to illustrate how, in Hindoo mythology, the ideas of a beautiful woman, the Moon, and the Sea, dissolve and disappear into one another, I have placed on the fly-leaf of this edition a single stanza, drawn from another part of my MS., which characteristically exemplifies that dissolving view: subjoining here, for the benefit of the uninitiated, a literal translation:

O thou lovely Incarnation of the Nectar-dropping Moon, come down from Heaven to lighten our Darkness: Delight of the Race of Man: retaining in thy Womanhood the dancing Play of the Waves of that Sea of Milk out of which thou wert originally churned by the Gods: we the Three Worlds (i. e. of Childhood, Manhood, and Age) do worship the Orb of thy Bosom that possesses for us a Threefold Mystical Feminine Energy1 being a Pitcher of Milk for us, when we are Born: a Pillow for us, in the Middle of the Path of Life: and a Shrine, in which we take refuge to die at the last.

But we lose, in a literal prose version, the reverberation, and the echo of the Sea, which undertones the meaning of the words like the accompaniment to a song. This sound we might make some attempt to preserve, without doing violence to the sense, as follows;