Translational audacity

The other day I received in the mail E.P. Rice's book Kanarese Literature. "Kanarese" is an old word for the south Indian language now called Kannada, spoken in Karnataka state. Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken by around 60 million people as a native language and has one of the oldest and best-respected literatures of any of the Indian languages. When I traveled to India many years ago I stayed in Karnataka and so since then I've harbored an interest in Kannada that lately I decided to do something about - hence the impetus for ordering this book.

The book was published in 1921, and is a mix of history and translated examples of Kannada poetry. I'm reading through the history part, but because poetry excites me, I skipped ahead and read through a lot of the translated passages. This being the 1920s, the poetry has been, hilariously, rendered in strict meter and rhyme in the style of English poetry. It's such an audacious choice that no self-respecting scholar would make today - but it definitely makes the poetry more fun to read. I've included some passages below that particularly struck me, whether for good reasons or bad, with brief little commentaries - I've put them below the cut for convenience sake.