Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 319

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

1933

I suppose the English and French¹ can go side by side – but the French should be revised by someone who knows how the language is printed – otherwise the divisions of words, etc. will be all wrong. If you send your proof copy here, the Mother will get it done by Pavitra. Yes Anjali is a very good heading for the translations.

I have read today along with the original your translation of the prayer in Page 373. It is a very fine poem, but it seems to me there are several touches which are more buoyant and hopeful and confident than the atmosphere of the original would tolerate. That atmosphere is one of abandonment, darkness, where all the circumstances justify despair – with it resignation, faith in the eventual utility of it all, a stoic-spiritual courage to go through, but all these like a flame burning under the weight of the thick darknesses – not the sense of an immediate help or even prayer or call for it or of any unsparing victory [shata jay] as in the translation. I mention this because it seems to me to give a less powerful, sombre and grandiose note to the mood expressed in the poem than that expressed in the original prayer.

¹ The French original and English translation of Mother’s Prayers and Meditations, some of which Dilip translated into Bengali and published in his book Anami.

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