Noble man with the victorious spear! Wondering, you ask,
“The young woman who wears a chaplet of mayilai flowers
whose shoulders are as long as the flowing wing of a forest crow—
can she be the daughter of anyone other than a warrior?”
Her loveliness, so choice as to merit the envy of Laksmi,
is for no one but fighting men! Her father is the overlord
of cool, riverine lands where the young of a yellow-legged crane,
when it forages and eats with its long beak near the shore
in the soft mud, finds eggs like mustard seed laid by sand-eels
and the babies of fine prawns! And should the kings begin
a great war just because they cannot have her, her brothers
will display their greatness by plowing every single day,
as is right, with their spears, and for them their stacks
of hay will be the dead corpses
and war elephants their buffaloes for threshing the harvest!