The verse is Vedic, not later devotional writing: it stands at Rig Veda 7.59.12, in the family book associated with the Vasishtha lineage, and is repeated with small variation at Vajasaneyi Samhita 3.60 in the White Yajur Veda. That double attestation across two of the four Vedic collections is part of why tradition treats it as archaic and especially potent, since most Vedic verses belong to one collection alone. Transmission followed the ordinary Vedic path for over two thousand years before it reached a devotional audience: reciters trained in a shakha, one of the surviving Vedic recensions, memorized it with its full accent marking, the udatta and anudatta pitch tones that distinguish correct recitation from mere words, and passed it teacher to student by ear long before it was ever set down in writing. Only in the last two centuries has it moved into printed prayer books, temple pamphlets and now recordings, stripped in nearly every popular version of the accent marks a Vedic pandit would still expect.
The argument among translators sits in one image: urvarukam iva bandhanan, the cucumber, or by some readings a bitter gourd or melon, released from its bandhana, its binding or stalk. One camp reads it as a plea for the fruit to be freed while still unripe, an urgent request for rescue. The more common Vedic reading takes it the other way: a ripe cucumber falls from the vine on its own, without force, and the prayer asks for that kind of death, a release like the ripe fruit's, not an escape from death altogether. Mamritat, at the end, is split between renderings: not from immortality and towards immortality are both defensible, and the difference changes whether the verse asks to be spared or to be perfected.