अवाच्यवादांश्च बहून् वदिष्यन्ति तवाहिताः।निन्दन्तस्तव सामर्थ्यं ततो दुःखतरं नु किम्॥
avācya-vādānś ca bahūn vadiṣyanti tavāhitāḥnindantastava sāmarthyaṃ tato duḥkhataraṃ nu kim
Word by word
The verse says
Your enemies will say a great many things they should not, sneering at what you could have done. What is more painful than that?
In plain words
The last turn of the screw.
Not only will your friends think less of you. Your enemies will mock the one thing you were sure of — your ability.
And Krishna ends with a question rather than a statement. What hurts more than that?
Where you've felt this · in relationships
Someone who never liked you gets to be right about you, publicly, for a reason that is not even true. There is no reply available. Any answer you give is more material.
Going deeper
Krishna has now spent six verses on reputation, and the accumulation is the point.
He is not adding new information. He is making Arjuna sit inside the consequence until it becomes concrete — the whispers, the specific men, the specific sneer. Arjuna spent Chapter 1 imagining the future in vivid detail, and Krishna is using the same faculty against the conclusion it produced.
But notice the question at the end, because it is a hinge. Tato duḥkhataraṃ nu kim — what is more painful than this?
It looks rhetorical. It is not. The Gita is about to answer it, and the answer is nothing external at all. By 2.38 pain and pleasure are being treated as the same kind of arriving weather. By 2.55 the settled person is described as untouched by any of it.
So Krishna asks what could hurt more than disgrace, and then spends the rest of the chapter dismantling the assumption that disgrace has to hurt at all.
This is the last verse of the lower argument. From here the register changes completely.