Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 3, Brahmana 1. Yajnavalkya at Janaka's sacrifice: the eight seizers
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
Beyond the waxing and waning
"Yajnavalkya," he said, "since all this is overtaken by the bright and the dark fortnights, all of it swayed by them, by what means is the sacrificer freed from the reach of the bright and the dark fortnights?" "By the Udgatr priest, by air, by the vital force. For the vital force is the Udgatr of the sacrifice. This vital force is that air; it is the Udgatr; it is the freeing, it is the full release."
Asvala asks: since the waxing and waning fortnights (purva-paksa and apara-paksa) overtake and rule everything, how does the sacrificer get beyond them? Yajnavalkya answers: through the Udgatr priest, who is air, who is the vital breath (prana). The sacrificer's vital force is identified with the air that is the Udgatr, and that recognition is the liberation (mukti, atimukti).
In the commentaries
Sankara reads the lunar fortnights as another mode of time's bondage, distinct from the solar day and night; the vital force as air is the moving power underlying these phases, so identifying one's prana with cosmic air, the Udgatr, carries the sacrificer past them into release and full release.