Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 135

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

June 22, 1931

I kept Khitish Sen’s translations with the idea of toning down some of the rather effete archaisms and other inelegances with which he unfortunately strews or rather peppers his work; but I renounce the endeavour, it would take too much of my time. I have marked the three poems which seem to me the best; they achieve something, in spite of some glaring faults of detail, are fairly equal and make something like a harmonious whole. There is a certain beauty of thought and expression kept up throughout. The other translations have lines and passages of merit, but fail as a whole.

The poetry of your friend is rather irritating, because it is always just missing what it ought to achieve,– one feels a considerable poetic possibility which does not produce work of permanence because it is not scrupulous enough or has not a true technique. The reasons for the failure can be felt, but are not easy to analyse. Among them there is evidently the misfortune of having passed strongly under the influence of poets who are quite out of date and learned a poetic style and language full of turns that smell of the schoolroom and the bookworm’s closet. Such awful things as “unsoughten,” “a-journeying,” “a-knocking,” “strayed gift” and the constant abuse of the auxiliary verb “to do” would be enough to down even the best poem. If he would rigorously modernise his language one obstacle to real poetic success would perhaps disappear,– provided he does not, on the contrary, colloquialise it too much – e.g. “my dear” etc. But the other grave defect is that he is constantly composing out of his brain, while one feels that a pressure from a deeper source is there and might break through, if only he would let it. Of course, it is a foreign language he is writing and very few can do their poetic best in a learned medium – but still the defect is there.

As to the novel, perhaps I simply meant that I was unwilling to exercise my critic’s scalpel on a living master of the art. In poetry it is different because I am there both a critic and a creator.

Yes, the mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads) as I have tried to describe it in the Future Poetry is what comes from the Overmind inspiration. Its characteristics are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these. The passages you mention (from the Upanishad and the Gita) have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily, as I have said, the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry – it has to take hold of something that was meant to be a mental, vital or other utterance and lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into the Overmind largeness. But in doing so there is usually a mixture of the two elements. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level. But to write of these things would need a greater length of exposition than I can give you at present.

But how then do you expect a supramental inspiration to come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely in human reach? That is always the error of the impatient aspirant, to think he can get the Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got it when in fact he has only got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest some kind of mixed Overmind consciousness.

As for your last question you are not likely to get any answer until the thing attempted (supposing it is being attempted) is accomplished.