qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
The sun is a thousand ages of leagues away.
You swallowed it whole, because you took it for a sweet ripe fruit.
Two measure-words are doing the work in the first half-line, and they do not belong to the same kind of measuring. A yojana is a distance, from yuj, to yoke: the ground covered before the animals are unhitched, a stage of a journey. A yuga is an age of the world, a span of time. The half-line yokes a time word to a distance word and multiplies by a thousand. That is not how anyone measures anything. It is how Awadhi says unreachably far, the way English says a million miles away and does not mean miles.
Since the twentieth century this half-line has circulated very widely as a claim that the poem encodes the distance from the earth to the sun: take a yuga at twelve thousand years, multiply by the thousand, read the product as yojanas, fix a yojana at eight miles, and the answer lands near ninety-six million. It is a modern reading, and it is worth saying plainly what it requires — a word for time read as a plain number, and one fixed length for the yojana, which the texts it comes from do not agree on. The sun's mean distance is about ninety-three million miles, and it is not constant. Tulsīdās is not doing astronomy in this chaupai. He is in the middle of a stretch about what this particular child did, and the subject of the couplet is an appetite.
Behind it is a story his hearers knew and did not need told. The infant Hanumān wakes hungry, sees the sun coming up red over the hill, and goes for it, because it looks like fruit. Līlyo is to gulp down. Madhura phala jānū — "taking it for a sweet fruit." The mistake is not stupidity; it is a category. He knows what fruit is. Nobody has yet told him what a sun is, or how far away things are allowed to be — and the enormous distance of the first half-line means nothing whatever to him. A traditional etymology of his name comes out of this story: hanu, the jaw, struck by Indra's bolt as he closed on it.
So the couplet sets the largest thing in the sky against the plainest hunger there is, and the hunger wins. What is being sung is not a calculation. It is a reach that had not learnt any limits yet, in a child who would later carry a mountain and cross an ocean, and the poem lets you see where all of that started.
When you were very small, what did you try to grab that you could not possibly have got? Ask someone at the table what you went for.
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made