just a draft but I'm pretty happy with it semantically at least
cool translation. i'd be curious to hear more about your thought process behind it, particularly with the use of "bed down" in verse 10 where i usually see it translated as "reborn".
>>3mt6erkosac2y
the last part of verse 10, word-for-word, reads "not indeed ever womb-bed again goes." Rebirth is definitely implicit, specifically being reborn in a human or animal realm. I think there's a further implication that if the successful practitioner were reborn, it would be in a heavenly realm where beings arise spontaneously. When people translate "goes" as "reborn" I think it's just to help the average westerner or modern person understand the implicit meaning. A lot of them probably haven't seriously thought about rebirth before.
As far as my general thought-process, I'd made the observation that (1) there are plenty of Metta Sutta translations already, and (2) modern translators tend to resolve the ambiguities in the same way. So a new translation may as well try to do something different.
I have a newer draft of this translation with some footnotes that go further into the ambiguous parts. I can share the footnotes with you now. Basically Verse 1 can mean a million things, and Verse 9 could be read as pretty anti-Brahminical if you want it to...
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