[1577] Bird’s-dome [f. 145b, n.] or The pair (qūsh) of domes.
[1578] gūn khūd kīch būlūb aīdī; a little joke perhaps at the lateness both of the day and the army.
[1579] Shaikh Zain’s maternal-uncle.
[1580] Shaikh Zain’s useful detail that this man’s pen-name was Sharaf distinguishes him from Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ the author of the Shaibānī-nāma.
[1581] gosha, angle (cf. gosha-i-kār, limits of work). Parodies were to be made, having the same metre, rhyme, and refrain as the model couplet.
[1582] I am unable to attach sense to Bābur’s second line; what is wanted is an illustration of two incompatible things. Bābur’s reflections [infra] condemned his verse. Shaikh Zain describes the whole episode of the verse-making on the raft, and goes on with, “He (Bābur) excised this choice couplet from the pages of his Acts (Wāqi‘āt) with the knife of censure, and scratched it out from the tablets of his noble heart with the finger-nails of repentance. I shall now give an account of this spiritual matter” (i.e. the repentance), “by presenting the recantations of his Solomon-like Majesty in his very own words, which are weightier than any from the lips of Aesop.” Shaikh Zain next quotes the Turkī passage here translated in b. Mention of the Mubīn.
[1583] The Mubīn (q.v. Index) is mentioned again and quoted on f. 351b. In both places its name escaped the notice of Erskine and de Courteille, who here took it for mīn, I, and on f. 351b omitted it, matters of which the obvious cause is that both translators were less familiar with the poem than it is now easy to be. There is amplest textual warrant for reading Mubīn in both the places indicated above; its reinstatement gives to the English and French translations what they have needed, namely, the clinch of a definite stimulus and date of repentance, which was the influence of the Mubīn in 928 AH. (1521-2 AD.). The whole passage about the peccant verse and its fruit of contrition should be read with others that express the same regret for broken law and may all have been added to the diary at the same time, probably in 935 AH. (1529 AD.). They will be found grouped in the Index s.n. Bābur.
[1584] mūndīn būrūn, by which I understand, as the grammatical construction will warrant, before writing the Mubīn. To read the words as referring to the peccant verse, is to take the clinch off the whole passage.
[1585] i.e. of the Qorān on which the Mubīn is based.
[1586] Dropping down-stream, with wine and good company, he entirely forgot his good resolutions.