Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 194
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
1932 (?)
Your translation1 is admirable. I like it very much and fully appreciate the beauty of the phrase you have discovered to translate mine – they are much better and nearer to the power and spirit of the original than the mere literal variants you cite. Durlabha nakṣatra-dīkṣā is very good, but not so good as āsanga ingit tara [?].
Nishikanto’s poem in laghu-guru [Sanskrit metre of short and long syllables] is splendid. But perhaps Girija would say that it is a pure Bengali rhythm, which means I suppose that it reads as well and easily in Bengali as if it were not written on an unusual rhythmic principle. I suppose that must necessarily be the aim of a new metre or metrical principle; it is what I am trying to do with quantitative efforts in English.
1 Probably of Sri Aurobindo’s poem “Trance” (see Collected Poems).