By the Book
Before I bought the Monier Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary, I bought a small Sanskrit-English dictionary online from Powells.com. When I got it, I realized it was going to be useless to me, because all the Indic words are in the Devanagari script, which I do not read sufficiently to transliterate. It looks to be an older book, possibly 19th century, originally published in India and reprinted in the 1990s in England.
Still, I find myself sitting up at night, thumbing through it, scanning the columns of strange script and familiar definitions. A dictionary half in an unknown language is a fountain of inspiration. Delightful connections are expressed there, along with conceptions that convince me that, in ancient India, the world had a civilization that has hardly been matched in subtlety and sophistication.
There are whole sermons and life lessons in a single word:
There are mysteries fit to be taken whole as a poem by Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams, or to inspire a Borges ficcione:
I meet words I wish I had; that is, words for which there is no single word in English that covers the same territory:
Still, I find myself sitting up at night, thumbing through it, scanning the columns of strange script and familiar definitions. A dictionary half in an unknown language is a fountain of inspiration. Delightful connections are expressed there, along with conceptions that convince me that, in ancient India, the world had a civilization that has hardly been matched in subtlety and sophistication.
- A man who does not cook for himself; a bad cook [a term of abuse].
- A mouse; a miser.
- Licked; surrounded.
- m. A bee; a scorpion. f. A woman's female friend.
- A whirlpool, a crowded place.
- Inaccessible; unfit for sexual intercourse; difficult to understand.
There are whole sermons and life lessons in a single word:
- Repentance, intense enmity, close attachment.
- Fire; appetite; gold.
- A great danger; a desperate act.
- Supported; haughty; near; obstructed.
- Touched; violated; judged; endured.
- Relaxation; independence.
There are mysteries fit to be taken whole as a poem by Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams, or to inspire a Borges ficcione:
- A benediction; a serpent's fang.
- Homeless, imperishable.
- Ungovernable; necessary.
- Painting figures on the body; feathering an arrow.
I meet words I wish I had; that is, words for which there is no single word in English that covers the same territory:
- Pleasure arising from sympathy.
- One who has suppressed his tears.
- An illustration of a thing by its reverse.
- A practice not usually proper to the caste but allowable in time of distress.
- A figure of speech dependent on sense and not on sound.
