Читать книгу Seven Hundred Elegant Verses - Govardhana - Страница 18

what does grief do that can be compared to the parrot’s ac- tion?

To express in a brutalist manner what is going on here, the translation ought to be something like the following.

Like a parrot wooden twigs cage, every day increasing my demolishes beloved’s heart grief Kama’s arrows sharp mouth.

This would no doubt present a challenge to any reader or listener, but I doubt that it would serve much of a purpose for the kind of enterprise undertaken in this book. Alternatively, this is what an “elegant,” smoothly flowing translation could look like.

Grief, with the arrows of Kama as its primary painful cause, must be increasing day by day and will be breaking my beloved’s heart, like a parrot whose beak is as sharp as Kama’s arrows, when, growing day by day, he bites his way through the cage made of wooden twigs.

This is the compromise I have adopted in many places, where the poet uses the syntactical and psychological structure analyzed above.

The many allusions to myth and other features of Indian culture, to say nothing of the use of puns and poetic conventions, make reading the “Seven Hundred Elegant Verses” somewhat challenging; this is particularly true of the first thirty-eight verses of the Prelude. For the rest, however, the adventurous reader is encouraged initially to ________