qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Sanaka and his three brothers, who were born from Brahma's mind and stayed children forever; Brahma himself, who was there at the start, and the great gods after him; the chief among the sages —
Narada with his lute, who goes everywhere and carries everything he hears; Sarada, who is speech itself; and with them Shesha, the serpent the earth is resting on —
This chaupai is half a sentence. Its verb is in the next one, and reading it alone is like hearing somebody draw breath.
Sanakādika means "Sanaka and those who begin with him" — the -ādi compound is how Sanskrit says and the rest without sounding like a clerk. Sanaka is the first of the four mind-born sons of Brahmā: Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanātana and Sanatkumāra, who in the Bhāgavata's telling declined to become makers of anything and remained boys. Brahmādi does the same work again, a few rungs up. A muni is a sage, and mauna, silence, is built from the same word; munīśa is a lord among them.
Ahīśa comes apart into ahi, serpent, and īśa, lord, and the lord of serpents is Śeṣa, whose coils are Viṣṇu's couch and whose hoods carry the earth. Śeṣa is thousand-headed, and the thousand-mouthed singer of the previous chaupai carries the same description. Sāradā is a name of Sarasvatī; Tulsīdās opens the Rāmcaritmānas by bowing to Vāṇī — speech, which is to say her — together with Gaṇeśa.
What the roll-call gathers is worth noticing for what all of them have in common. The four who have thought longest, the god who made the alphabet's worth of everything, the sage who travels the worlds carrying news, the goddess who is speech, and the serpent with a thousand mouths to say it with. This is every kind of eloquence there is, lined up in two lines. The next chaupai says what happens to all of it.
Think of someone you love. How long could you keep naming good things about them before you ran out?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made