Some notes:
- “Amma” literally translates to “Mother”. However, over time, it has evolved to be used by many to refer to any woman affectionately or informally by people of any gender. People call their daughters and granddaughters “amma”, their nieces and friends’ daughters. Their friends. It is also an implicit understanding however that sometimes “amma” is short for “ammayi”, which just means “girl”. As a choice, I’ve decided to keep “amma” as just “amma” in the poem and its title. But I wanted to give you guys some context about the meaning.
- Padhyam – I learned today that apparently a padhyam is a form of poetry originating in ancient India. In Telugu, we talk about “padhyam” a lot, but we never usually have to think about the translation. Usually, we think of it as poetry but I knew it’s not exactly poetry which is called “kavyam”. So some discussion with my father and some online research and I discovered that while “kavyam” is literally “poetry”, “padhyam” refers to a style of poetic structure. For comparables from other cultures: sonnets, haikus.
- “You have become liked by me” – In English, that makes grammatical sense but is unnecessary, of course. In English, we just say “I like you”. But I like trying my best to preserve the original language’s grammatical sense and tense. It just gives it a more authentic feel and also allows for creative language that doesn’t naturally exist. What do you think?
- One last thing: I’m linking the Instagram promo post for this blog article below and I would highly appreciate all of you please clicking on the link and commenting your thoughts. Feel free to comment here directly on MML as well.
