Salutations to Rudra (Based on the Exposition of Sri Rudram)

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Namaste astu bhagavan visvesvaraya mahadevaya…
Srimanmahadevaya namah…

Sri Rudram

To the Lord of the Universe
Effulgence Omniscient
My salutations
The three-eyed God
Destroyer of the three cities
The states of waking, dream and sleep
Fire of time, past, present, to be
Destroyer of time, yet timeless is he
Blue-necked Lord, vanquisher of death
He is the Lord of all
Endowed with every wealth
May be bless us, the Sovereign Supreme

A literal translation can never capture all that the hymn inspires. The translator of let go the terseness of prose and take to free style, giving expression to the grasp of every lime…

When one wants to capture in words the glories of the Lord, one finds oneself crossing the norms that govern objective writing. One resorts to exclamations, hyperboles and high sounding adjectives amounting to seeming exaggeration. Bt all of them are meant to capture the Lord, the whole, of infinite hues. That is what the Vedic Hymn Sri Rudram presents. A literal translation can never capture all that the hymn inspires. The translator has to let go the terseness of prose and take to free style, giving expression to the grasp of every line. I see this in this English rendering of the hymn by Smt. Sheela Balaji. She has grasped the whole and luckily she has the facility of expression. I congratulate her for this inspiring contribution.