qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Trouble is cut clean through, and every ache is rubbed right out,
for whoever calls Hanuman to mind — Hanuman the strong, Hanuman the brave.
Two verbs of removal in half a line, and they are not the same verb twice.
Kaṭai is cutting: a blade through a thing, a rope parted, the trouble severed rather than untangled. Miṭai is erasure — what happens to chalk on a slate, to writing rubbed off with the side of a hand. One is violent and instantaneous, the other is patient and leaves a surface clean. Saṃkaṭa, a tight place, a strait, gets the blade; pīrā, plain aching pain, gets the cloth. The poem has matched each kind of trouble to the treatment it takes, and the match is not decorative.
Sumirai is the verb the whole condition hangs on. From Sanskrit smṛ, to remember, it gives smaraṇa, and in north Indian devotional usage it is much stronger than the English "remember". It is the holding of a name in mind as a sustained thing, the kind that is still going on when nothing in particular is happening. Not calling someone to mind once; keeping them there.
Anyone who has been reciting from the start will notice they have been here before. Eleven verses earlier the Chalisa ran nāsai roga harai saba pīrā, japata niraṃtara hanumata bīrā — disease destroyed, all pain taken away, for whoever recites without stopping. Same second half, near enough; same pairing of pain and a practice of constant attention; different verbs. A forty-verse text sung from memory circles back on its own phrases, and the circling is how it stays in the mouth.
Trouble cut, pain wiped, for whoever remembers — and the part of the sentence that asks anything is the last clause, not the first.
Is there something that bothers you less the moment you think about one particular person?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made