The above photo is a page from my notes on the Kashmiri text of Lalla's poems. There are about thirty of these pages, most of them equally densely marked with my corrections and notes. When I recently took the project up again (I like to think that it was at Lalla's own urging), I was amazed at the huge amount of preparatory work I had already done, years earlier. I had done so much, in fact, that you'd think I could just turn the crank and spit the translations out. Lalla, though, saw to it that it would never be that simple, either for me or for anyone else. Apart from being a fine poet, she was an amazing spiritual teacher. I may have the roughly 150 poems of the planned collection translated within a few months (at this pace, I will), but I'll still have years of work to do.
ॐ नमः शिवाय ॐ
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