Through renouncement of wine hewildered am I ; How to work know I not, so distracted am I ; While others repent and make vow to abstain, I have vowedto abstain, and repentant am I.
A witticism of Banal's came back to my mind: One day when he had been joking in 'All-sher Beg's presence, who must have been wearing a jacket with buttons,1 'All-sher Beg said, ' Thou makest charming jokes ; but for the buttons, I would give thee the jacket; they are the hindrance (mani1).' Said Banal, 'What hindrance are buttons ? It is button-holes {mddagi) that hinder.'2 Let responsibility for this story lie on the teller! hold me excused for it ; for God's sake do not be offended by it.3 Again : that quatrain was made before last year, and in truth the longing and craving for a wine-party has been infinite and endless for two years past, so much so that sometimes the craving for wine brought me to the verge of tears. Thank God ! this year that trouble has passed from my mind, perhaps by virtue of the blessing and sustainment of versifying the translation.4 Do thou also renounce wine! If had with equal associates and booncompanions, wine and company are pleasant things ; but with whom canst thou now associate ? with whom drink wine ? If thy boon-companions are Sher-i-ahmad and Haidar-qull, it should not be hard for thee to forswear wine. So much said, I salute thee and long to see thee." 5
The above letter was written on Thursday the 1st of the latter Jumada {Feb. roth). It affected me greatly to write concerning
1 The surface retort seems connected with the jacket, perhaps with a request for the gift of it.
2 Clearly what recalled this joke of Banal's long-silent, caustic tongue was that its point lay ostensibly in a baffled wish in 'Ali-sher's professed desire to be generous and a professed impediment, which linked in thought with Babur's desire for wine, baffled by his abjuration. So much Banal's smart verbal retort shows, but beneath this is the dot^ble-entendre which cuts at the Beg as miserly and as physically impotent, a defect which gave point to another jeer at his expense, one chronicled by Sam Mirza and translated in Hammer-Purgstall's Geschichle von schbXen Redekiinste Persiens, art. CLV. (Cf. f. 179-80.) The word mddagi is used metaphorically for a button-hole ; like nd-mardi, it carries secondary meanings, miserliness, impotence, etc. (Cf. Wollaston's English-Persian Dictionary s.n. button-hole, where only we have found mddagi with this sense.)
3 The 1st Pers. trs. expresses "all these jokes", thus including with the doubletneanings of mddagi, the jests of the quatrain.
* The 1st Pers. trs. fills out Babur's allusive phrase here with "of the Walidiyyah" ■ His wording allows the inference that what he versified was a prose Turki translation of a probably Arabic original.
5 Erskine comments here on the non-translation into Persian of Babur's letters. Many MSS., however, contain a translation (f. 348, p. 624, n. 2 and E.'s n. f. 377^)-
