Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 225

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

April 27, 1932

You have certainly done something like a miracle. It hardly seemed to me possible that the Sanskrit metre in its exactitude could be reproduced in Bengali. I thought it could only be by the fiction of the mora = guru [long vowel], which may be all right in Bengali itself but does not produce the same modulation as in Sanskrit. And it is a beautiful poem too, not colourless and poetically wooden like Satyen Dutt’s lines. As for the inner rhythm it is surely the Mandakranta rhythm,– more lyrical, less elegiac than the movement of the Meghaduta, but still the same. Your statement of true distinction – in the spirit of the movement as opposed to its body or rather an immobile clay figure representing the mobile body, for that is what Satyen Dutt’s reproduction comes to,– is, I believe, quite accurate.