[2480] jībachī. Bābur’s injunction seems to refer to the maintaining of the corps and the manufacture of armour rather than to care for the individual men involved.
[2481] Either the armies in Nīl-āb, or the women in the Kābul-country (f. 375).
[2482] Perhaps what Bābur means is, that both what he had said to ‘Abdu’l-lāh and what the quatrain expresses, are dissuasive from repentance. Erskine writes (Mems. p. 403) but without textual warrant, “I had resolution enough to persevere”; de Courteille (Mems. ii, 390), “Voici un quatrain qui exprime au juste les difficultés de ma position.”
[2483] The surface retort seems connected with the jacket, perhaps with a request for the gift of it.
[2484] Clearly what recalled this joke of Banāī’s long-silent, caustic tongue was that its point lay ostensibly in a baffled wish—in ‘Alī-sher’s professed desire to be generous and a professed impediment, which linked in thought with Bābur’s desire for wine, baffled by his abjuration. So much Banāī’s smart verbal retort shows, but beneath this is the double-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 Sām Mīrzā and translated in Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte von schönen Redekünste Persiens, art. CLV. (Cf. f. 179-80.)—The word mādagī is used metaphorically for a button-hole; like nā-mardī, it carries secondary meanings, miserliness, impotence, etc. (Cf. Wollaston’s English-Persian Dictionary s.n. button-hole, where only we have found mādagī with this sense.)
[2485] The 1st Pers. trs. expresses “all these jokes”, thus including with the double-meanings of mādagī, the jests of the quatrain.
[2486] The 1st Pers. trs. fills out Bābur’s allusive phrase here with “of the Wālidiyyah”. His wording allows the inference that what he versified was a prose Turkī translation of a probably Arabic original.
[2487] Erskine comments here on the non-translation into Persian of Bābur’s letters. Many MSS., however, contain a translation (f. 348, p. 624, n. 2 and E.’s n. f. 377b).
[2488] Anglicé, Thursday after 6 p.m.
[2489] What would suit measurement on maps and also Bābur’s route is “Jumoheen” which is marked where the Sarāī Bāburpūr-Atsu-Phaphand road turns south, east of Phaphand (I.S. Map of 1900, Sheet 68).