On Translation

Today’s translation-yoga was a battle I barely won. By that I mean I struggled all day to sit down to translate, and when I did, the words wouldn’t come and the text was utterly opaque to me. It felt like I was drunk and trying to read road signs in a language I could neither read nor speak, and one I had never heard before. Worse still, I was rendered mute, and unable to find any linguistic register at all. So, the win is only that I eventually managed to translate *something* some 6 hours after I first started on this verse. One can only hope that tomorrow is better because today was painful.

As dusk set, the sky turned red
a river of blood flooding the sky, he emerged
a lion tearing through a mountain, this is how
my father killed the demon who brought such sorrow.

Nammalvar. Tiruvaymoli VII.4.6