True gallantry being one
of the altruistic ingredients of love, it would be useless to seek for
it among the Hindoos. Not so with hyperbole, which being simply a
magnifying of one's own sensations and an expression of extravagant
feeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well as
of sentimental love. The eager desire for a girl's favor makes her
breath and all her attributes seem delicious not only to man but to
inanimate things. The following, with the finishing touches applied by
the German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closely
than any other of Hala's songs:
No. 13: "O you who are skilled in cooking! Do not be
angry (that the fire fails to burn). The fire does not
burn, smokes only, in order to drink in (long) the
breath of (your) mouth, perfumed like red patela
blossoms."
In the use of hyperbole it is very difficult to avoid the step from
the sublime to the ridiculous. The author of No. 153 had a happy
thought when he sang that his beloved was so perfect a beauty that no
one had ever been able to see her whole body because the eye refused
to leave whatever part it first alighted on. This pretty notion is
turned into unconscious burlesque by the author of No. 274, who
complains,
"How can I describe her from whose limbs the eyes that
see them cannot tear themselves away, like a weak cow
from the mud she is sticking in.
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