incredibly thrilled to have graduated from my second Master’s Degree awarded with a Distinction and with A+ on my final portfolios & dissertation. ❤️🔥
moving forward with the beautiful words spoken by Baroness Ashton, Warwick University’s first ever woman chancellor, as one of my precepts in life: assume that anyone you ever meet knows something you don’t. further, i was moved by two of our professors’ kind reminders to us, which i will share here.
first: yes, what we have achieved is great and we must celebrate it “wildly and loudly”; and yet, we must not be complacent and rest on our laurels. don’t stop; keep moving. there is always room for refinement, growth, expansion. of course, there is and there isn’t – as in, the whole is not separate from the parts, and the part is still the whole even if it appears part, as the Upaniṣads teach us. and yet; when the grasping to knowledge that comes from insecurity and self-loathing begins to stop… glimpses of the human potentiality that is never-ending yet whole begin to become accessible.
second: do not hoard knowledge. do not claim it as solely your own. share generously.
grateful our professors reminded us of our limitations. onward with enthusiasm and dedication to knowledge and to perfecting my craft.
finally… this is my third degree yet first awarding ceremony i have attended due to pandemic reasons and life circumstances, so i was especially excited to have this experience. 🥰
gratitude to my professors, supervisors, family, colleagues and friends. 🙏
these past two years at Warwick University were a rich immersion in the art of poetry & in the practice of literary translation. milestones achieved have been:
completing my dissertation, entitled “Rendering Sacred Texts: Ethics and the Question of Untranslatability”, in which i explored the practice of translating sacred texts and the intricate issues it presents in the field of translation studies, mainly posed by the dilemma that is the hypothesis of an intrinsically sacred quality to languages such as Sanskrit or Latin. i argued that in the case of non-dual traditions, the subsequent question, of whether translation would defile the text, is incongruent with the philosophy & cosmology the text is rooted in. i used the Lalitāsahasranāma, a central hymn of Śrīvidyā, as a case-study.
onward!
amaryllis 