Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
I like your new poem immensely – it seems to me that you have achieved in it a largeness and depth of thought and an ample harmony of expression and rhythm which mark a new and remarkable advance in your poetic development. Here at least there is no lack of progress – and a very rapid progress.
Harin’s1 poem [“The Cycle”], though beautiful in expression and good in rhythm, is, as often, fanciful in parts and I do not like the tag about God and clod – it sounds almost silly, but the last two lines (no matter about the flaw in their philosophy) are poetically magnificent. Your translation seems to me excellent; it has got rid of most of the fancifulness and your version of the God-clod lines is preferable to the original. It is only the close that fails to render the power of the text; but it may not be possible in Bengali.
The translation of Suhrawardy [“Some Day”] is also good; only the stormy night gives it a quite different atmosphere which is not that of the original poem. Whatever merit the original has depends upon its quiet and subdued tones and the very slightness of the figures and details of the cadre for the light memory of another’s deep and tragic sorrow,– purposely, everything loud, emphatic or dramatic is avoided. But in the translation the stormy night brings in this very element of something emphatic and dramatic. I do not say that the translation is not poetic and harmonious,– it is, but in a different tone altogether and with a different suggestion, a graver emotion, but a less subtly pathetic power of contrast.
The rendering of “Revelation” [Sri Aurobindo’s poem] is even better than the two others, well inspired from beginning to end; the colouring is not quite the same as in my poem, but that is hardly avoidable in a poetic version in another language. To alter it, as you propose, would be to spoil it. There is no point in rendering literally “wind-blown locks”, and it would be a pity to throw out dīptimayī [lustrous, radiant], for it is just the touch needed to avoid the suggestion of a merely human figure. It is needed – for readers are often dense. An Indian critic (very competent, if a little academic) disregarding all the mystic suggestions and even the plain statement of the closing couplet, actually described the 
poem as the poet’s memory of a girl running past him on the seashore!!
I refuse to fall into your trap about Tagore. In vain is the net spread openly in the sight of the bird by the fowler.