Poverty

On what want does to a life and to the standing of the person in it, described without contempt for the poor.

This is the hardest chapter in this part of the book to place a page beside, because most of what it says is description and one line of it can be read as accusation.

What it describes, it describes without assigning a cause. 1041 asks what is harder than want and answers that only want itself is. 1043 puts two things going together — an old standing and the ability to speak in one's own voice. 1045 says want brings a crowd of afflictions, in the plural. 1048 is the dread of the day coming round again, and 1049 is sleep, which will come to a person lying in fire and not to a person in want. Not one of these says why anybody is short. Parimelazhagar does not supply a reason either, and where a translator has supplied one it is named on the word card as his.

Two places need saying out loud. 1047 carries a qualifier that the couplet puts first and that a reader can lose: `அறம் சாரா`, want that is not joined with right conduct. Everything the verse then says is said of that, and not of poverty as such — which is why all three counsels on that page open on those two words rather than burying them.

And 1050 is the line this chapter has to answer rather than pass on. Aiyar renders it 'The one way open to the indigent is to renounce utterly, their lives'. The couplet contains no word for life and neither does Parimelazhagar, whose `துறத்தல்` is renunciation of consumable goods — `நுகரப்படும் பொருள்கள்`. Read alone, on a page about poverty, that sentence tells somebody in hardship that the one course open to them is to stop living. We print the public-domain translations as they stand and do not alter them, so the page answers him instead: the `துறவாமை` card states in both languages that he supplies an object the lines have not got, and that nothing in the Tamil says what is to be renounced.

One boundary is worth knowing while reading. Nothing in these ten verses is about asking anybody for anything — no scene here stages a person approaching another for money, food or help. That is the next chapter, இரவு, and the two are deliberately kept apart.

AI draft · pending review