Jasmine

When jasmine
Is not in bloom
In palace gardens
Courtiers must
Bedeck themselves
With Kan flowers

When jasmine
Is in full bloom
In Mandalay's
Palace gardens
Courtiers never
Adorn themselves
With Kan flowers

Then Kan flowers
Find favor only
Among villagers

By U Pon Nya
Note: U Pon Nya was one of the best poet in the reign of King Min Don ( 1853-1878). The King awarded to U Pon Nya as a noble title a pieces of land as a fief. Jasmine has a sweet odor and is beautiful whereas kan flower although beautiful have no ordor.

This classical poem was translated by The most Rev, FRIEDRICH V. LUSTIG, Buddhist Archbishop of Lavita.


In Burmese version as below, please download zawgyifont and install if you cant see Burmese Font/Language.

စံပယ္ပန္း

ပန္းစံပယ္ နန္းလယ္မေပၚခိုက္ဟာမို႕
အလိုက္ေတာ္တန္သင့္႐ံုပ ခံပြင့္ကိုကုံး

နန္းရေဝ မန္းေျမ စံပယ္လိႈင္ေတာ့၊
ခံပန္းခိုင္ ယာယီေရြ႕တယ္ ၊ ေတာေလ့ရြာသုံး

ဦးပုည