Poverty

TIRUVALLUVAR
Translated from Tamil by R. Sundaresan

What can be as miserable as poverty?
Only poverty can be.
He who is afflicted by poverty
can have no happiness
either in this birth or in the next.

He who is poverty-afflicted
will lose the age-old fame and nobility of his heredity.
Even a man of high birth
will frame on his lips words indecent
if his mind is troubled by poverty.

The misery of poverty
changes into and leads to
the multi-dimensional miseries of life.

A man of shameful poverty
may expound the subtlest sense of a rare work
but he will go unheard, unheeded.

Even mother
disregards h is poverty-afflicted son
as a stranger.

He who undergoes the rig ours of poverty
is chilled to the bone,
when he thinks
whether poverty that literally killed him yesterday

will visit him even today.
Inside fire man can sleep
but impossible is it
to have a wink of sleep in poverty.

Strong-willed may be a man to renounce the world
but he renounced not
for he is still fond of his gruel and salt.