qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Your blazing strength runs right through all four ages of the world.
Everyone has heard of it, and it lights the whole world up.
The four yugas are the great ages the Purāṇic reckoning divides time into — Satya (or Kṛta), Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali, running from the longest and least troubled to the shortest and most disordered, and turning over again. Rāma's story belongs to Tretā. The Chalisa is sung in Kali.
That gap is exactly what the line is built on. Most figures in the Rāmāyaṇa are of their age; Hanumān, in the devotional literature and in the Purāṇic lists of the cirañjīvī — the long-lived, those who do not die out of the world — is held to remain in it as long as Rāma's story is told anywhere. The lists differ from source to source about who else is on them, but Hanumān is on all of them. A claim spanning four ages is therefore not poetic inflation here; it is the specific thing this figure is said to be.
Pratāpa is not fame. The root is tap, to burn, to glow with heat — the same root that gives tapas, the heat of austerity. Pratāpa is the radiated blaze of someone formidable, the thing you feel at a distance before you have been told anything.
Which makes the second line's pairing deliberate. Parasiddha is renown, from prasiddha — what is widely established, what has been heard. Ujiyārā is brightness, what is seen. Heard of everywhere and visible everywhere, in a single line: the two ways a thing gets known, and the verse claims both without choosing.
Who is the oldest person you have heard stories about — someone nobody alive has met?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made