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ḳhvush : 'Glad, happy, pleased, delighted, merry, gay; content, willing'. (Platts p.496)
kar jānā : ''To finish and depart,' to have done with'. (Platts p.828)
shuʿūr : 'Knowledge, wisdom, intelligence, sense, discretion, discernment, sagacity, penetration; good management'. (Platts p.728)
FWP:
SETS == GENERATORS; KYA
MOTIFS == MADNESS
NAMES
TERMS == PARADOXThe first line is almost suspiciously simple and straightforward-- so much so that it becomes piquant. We just know that something gnarly awaits us in that second line. And sure enough, the second line is almost a limit case of the kind of thing I love. Out of seven small words it makes an astonishing can of worms. Let's leave aside the kyā for the moment, and consider how to read the other six words.
(1) junūñ kar ke gayā shuʿūr se , vuh -- 'He did madness, and went, {with / through} sagacity'. (Either or both actions were sagacious.)
(2) junūñ kar [ ke ] gayā , shuʿūr se , vuh -- 'Having done madness, he went, {with / through} sagacity'. (His going was sagacious.)
(3) junūñ kar [ ke ], gayā shuʿūr se , vuh -- 'Having done madness, he went out of his mind/sagacity'. (He went mad and 'took leave of his senses'.)
In general, kar jānā means 'to do something and then go', 'to do something in passing' (it often sounds elegiac), so that an extra action is added to the simple idea of doing (see the definition above). Also clear is the versatility of se -- here it can mean 'with sagacity' (= in a sagacious manner) or 'through sagacity' (= as a result of sagacity); these may often be similar, but are not at all identical. (In fact it's easy to imagine that someone might, say, leave town out of prudence, but not leave town in a prudent manner.) And just as one can 'come to his senses' [hosh meñ ānā], or 'take leave of his senses' [hosh se jānā], he can surely in a similar fashion 'take leave of his sagacity' [shuʿūr se jānā].
Thus each of these three readings can generate at least two or three possible, subtly different interpretations. Then of course if we reattach the kyā , we're talking about surely a dozen or so possible readings. My translations above seek to capture only the range of (1), which is SRF's preferred reading, which ignores the gayā . (If we pay attention to the gayā by reading kar ke gayā , we see that perhaps what people liked about Mir's madness was just that part of it-- that after he went mad, he went away.)
Having a dozen readings from seven words is a somewhat dizzying pleasure in itself, but even more enjoyable is how every single one of them has its own particular and piquant chemistry with the first line. And all this semi-controlled proliferation is also a striking evocation of what it might be like to combine 'madness' and 'sagacity'.
Note for grammar fans: For more on the special idiomatic possibilities (other than kar deletion) of kar gayā , see {1781,1}.