qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
"The thousand-mouthed serpent sings your fame, and does not stop" —
and saying that, Shripati — the lord of Lakshmi — folds you into his arms.
Sahasa badana, thousand-mouthed, is the standing epithet of Śeṣa, also called Ananta, the endless serpent the Purāṇas describe Viṣṇu resting on between the worlds. The line can also be heard flatly — a thousand mouths sing your fame, however many that takes — and it is sung both ways.
Śrīpati is lord of Śrī, which is a name of Viṣṇu, used here of Rāma without a seam in it. Devotional poetry moves between the prince standing in front of you and the reality he is a face of, in the same breath and with no sense of having changed subject.
The first half-line is still Rāma talking. Asa kahi — "having said so" — closes a speech, and the speech it closes is the one begun in the chaupai before, so the thousand mouths are Rāma's praise of him and not the poet's. The only words the poem puts in Rāma's mouth end by handing the praising to somebody else.
Then the tense, because it changes here. Everything from the burning of Laṅkā onward has been in the past — showed, burned, destroyed, revived, praised. Both verbs here are present: gāvaiṃ, they sing; lagāvaiṃ, he embraces. Inside the speech a present is ordinary — Rāma is saying what Śeṣa does. But lagāvaiṃ is the poet's own verb and it is present too, so the report of what happened becomes a description of what is going on. The serpent has not finished singing, and the arms have not let go.
It is also the second embrace in three verses. Two lines back it was ura lāye, drawn to the chest; here it is kaṇṭha lagāvaiṃ, gathered in at the neck. For a poem so full of leaping and burning, a remarkable amount of it is people holding on to each other.
When you do something well, who is the first person you want to tell?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made