Verse

Since the quarter-verse (pāda) is the basic unit of composition, it is often instructive and especially efficient to translate verses quarter-by-quarter. This reading practice accomplishes several things at once:

• it often breaks up sandhi and at least morpheme-, though usually also word-, boundaries for you
• it usually provides you with a syntactically connected span of text
• it mimics the practice of a reader fluent in Sanskrit, allowing you to progress through a series of verses more quickly
• it retains for you the unfolding of the narrative or the poetic image, which will be lost in the verse’s anvaya (the normative syntactic reordering of the verse in a prose sentence) in commentary (and most prose translations)
  

For important exceptions to the integrity of the pāda as a compositional unity, see this note on innovations in metrical syntax beginning with Kālidāsa. Another exception of a sort is the ubiquitous śloka, which may be thought of as consisting of two lines rather than four (AB and CD being typically identical in structure). Even so, verses from the śloka-dominated epics may still often be translated pāda-by-pāda, as indicated by the following example (color-coded per grammatical case):

तस्मिन्प्रयाते शिबिरं द्रोणपुत्रे महात्मनि । कृपश्च कृतवर्मा च शिबिरद्वार्यतिष्ठताम् ॥५॥
अश्वत्थामा तु तौ दृष्ट्वा यत्नवन्तौ महारथौ ।प्रहृष्टः शनकै राजन्निदं वचनमब्रवीत् ॥६॥

तस्मिन्प्रयाते शिबिरं
द्रोणपुत्रे महात्मनि ।
कृपश्च कृतवर्मा च
शिबिरद्वार्यतिष्ठताम् ॥५॥

अश्वत्थामा तु तौ दृष्ट्वा
यत्नवन्तौ महारथौ ।
प्रहृष्टः शनकै राज-
न्निदं वचनमब्रवीत् ॥६॥

(a) When he had arrived at the camp—
(b) (that) great-souled son of Droṇa—
(c) both Kṛpa and Kṛtavarman
(d) were standing at the camp’s gate. ||5||

(a) Now, Aśvatthāman, upon seeing those two
(b) great warriors possessed of zeal,
(c) was overjoyed,* O king, and softly
(d) these words did he speak: ||6||

* The gerund clause begins a series of three actions: gerund-pp.-verb, i.e., seeing (दृष्ट्वा), being overjoyed (प्रहृष्टः) and speaking (अब्रवीत्). The past participle here closely construes with the gerund. To connect them in prose, we would say: “Overjoyed upon seeing..., he said,” which is the same construction we’ve seen in Deshpande a number of times: तस्य मुनेस्तन्मधुरं वचनं श्रुत्वा प्रसन्ना सा मेनका..., “Pleased upon hearing those sweet words of that sage, Menakā....”

We can summarize the way in which the verse-quarters break up the grammar as follows (revealing in the process a few instructive parallelisms):

• 5 (a) measures out a contextual predication (locative absolute)
• 5 (b) provides its apposite qualifiers
• 5 (c) provides the subject (nominative)
• 5 (d) provides the predicate (finite verb, locative complement)
• 6 (a) provides another contextual predication (gerund clause)
• 6 (b) provides its apposite qualifiers
• 6 (c) references the subject in one verbal action (प्रहृष्टः) but also begins (with शनकैः) another verbal action that will conclude in (d) with the predicate (finite verb and direct object)

So, of the 8 quarters given here only 1 (6c) contains two grammatically disconnected functions: the participle, प्रहृष्टः, indicates one action while the adverb, शनकैः, modifies a second action in the next verse-quarter (the verb, अब्रवीत्, in 6d). Which means that reading-by-pāda not only usefully splits up sandhi (e.g., राजन् + इदम्) for you; it also helps you in almost every quarter to construe the sentences’ syntax. If you can read pāda-by-pāda to break up the sandhi, morphemes and grammar (but also with a little flexibility to take into account grammar that occasionally spans more than one pāda) you will make much quicker progress in your reading than if you were to treat each verse as a chaotic jumble completely devoid of syntactic connections. And along the way, you will be able to appreciate the poetry / plot development in a way similar to traditional audiences.

For all of your verse assignments, you should therefore try to translate as above. You needn’t feel overly constrained to always retain the order of the pādas. Indeed, if the word order in them is natural Sanskrit syntax (SOV), then it will be the opposite of English syntax (SVO)—in which case the English translation will sound as unnatural as the Sanskrit sounds natural. But it is often useful to retain pādas themselves insofar as they tend to organize syntax in a meaningful way. And even where it may not be quite as immediately useful as above—e.g., where the syntax is more loosely connected to the pādas—it will nevertheless be useful in revealing precisely that fact (e.g., the looser pāda / syntax connection). Such insights will help to inform our understanding of a work’s poetic and performative effects and the work’s place, style-wise, in Sanskrit poetry’s long history. Indeed, that history has been analyzed as a gradual liberation of syntax from meter, with an increasing metrical-stylistic dissonance being regularly put to great artistic effect especially in Kālidāsa and his successors.