SRI AUROBINDO
The Future Poetry
and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art
Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art
Section Four. Translation of Poetry
Two Ways of Translating Poetry
140
There is no question of defective poetry or lines. There are two ways of rendering a poem from one language into another — one is to keep strictly to the manner and turn of the original, the other to take its spirit, sense and imagery and reproduce them freely so as to suit the new language. A’s poem is exceedingly succinct, simply-direct and compact in word, form, rhythm, yet full of suggestion — it would perhaps not be possible to do the same thing in Bengali; it is necessary to use an ampler form, and this is what you have done. Your translation is very beautiful; only, side by side with the original, one looks like a delicate miniature, the other like a rich enlargement. If you compare his
Where is it calling
The eyes of night
with the corresponding lines in your poem, you can see the difference. I did not mean to suggest that it was necessary to change anything.
11.7.1937
Freedom in Translation
141
A translator is not necessarily bound to the exact word and letter of the original he chooses; he can make his own poem out of it if he likes, and that is what is very often done. This is all the more legitimate since we find that literal translations more completely betray than those that are reasonably free — turning life into death and poetic power into poverty and flatness. It is not many who can carry over the spirit of a poem, the characteristic power of its expression and the turn of its rhythmical movement from one language to another, especially when the tongues in question are so alien in temperament to each other as English and Bengali. When that can be done, there is the perfect translation.
Literalness in Translation
142
The proper rule about literalness in translation, I suppose, is that one should keep as close as possible to the original provided the result does not read like a translation but like an original poem in Bengali, and, as far as possible, as if it were the original poem originally written in Bengali.
I admit that I have not practised what I preached,— whenever I translated I was careless of the hurt feelings of the original text and transmogrified it without mercy into whatever my fancy chose. But that is a high and mighty criminality which one ought not to imitate. Latterly I have tried to be more moral in my ways, I don’t know with what success. But anyhow it is a case of “Do what I preach and avoid what I practise.”
10.10.1934
Importance of Turn of Language in Translation
143
I do not think it is the ideas that make the distinction between European and Indian tongues — it is the turn of the language. By taking over the English turn of language into Bengali one may very well fail to produce the effect of the original because this turn will seem outlandish in the new tongue; but one can always, by giving a right turn of language more easily acceptable to the Bengali mind and ear, make the idea as natural and effective as in the original; or even if the idea is strange to the Bengali mind one can by the turn of language acclimatise it, make it acceptable. The original thought in the passage you are translating may be reduced to something like this: “Here is all this beautiful world, the stars, the forest, the birds — I have not yet lived long enough to know them all or for them to know me so that there shall be friendship and familiarity between us and now I am thus untimely called away to die”. That is a perfectly human feeling, quite as possible, more easily possible, to an Indian than to a European (witness Kalidasa’s Shakuntala) and can very well be acceptable. But the turn given it in English is abrupt and bold though quite forcible and going straight home — in Bengali it may sound strange and not go home. If so, you have to find a turn in Bengali for the idea which will be as forcible and direct; not here only but everywhere this should be the rule. Naturally, one should not go too far away from the original and say something quite different in substance but, subject to this limitation, any necessary freedom is quite admissible.
October, 1934
Difficulties of Catching Subtleties in Translation
144
It is not that I find the translations here satisfactory in the full sense of the word, but they are better than I expected. There is none of them, not even the best, which I would pronounce to be quite the thing. But this “quite the thing” is so rare a trouvaille, it is as illusive as the capture of Eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable. Bengali, like French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy — one has to go out of one’s way to find it. Witness Mallarme’s wrestlings with the French language to find the symbolic expression — the right turn of speech for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is the difference.
Translation of Prose into Poetry
145
I think it is quite legitimate to translate poetic prose into poetry; I have done it myself when I translated The Hero and the Nymph on the ground that the beauty of Kalidasa’s prose is best rendered by poetry in English, or at least that I found myself best able to render it in that way. Your critic’s rule seems to me rather too positive; like all rules it may stand in principle in a majority of cases, but in the minority (which is the best part, for the less is often greater than the more) it need not stand at all. Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters. Again what of the reverse cases — the many fine prose translations of poets so much better and more akin to the spirit of the original than any poetic version of them yet made? One need not go farther than Tagore’s English version of his Gitanjali. If poetry can be translated so admirably (and therefore legitimately) into prose, why should not prose be translated legitimately (and admirably) into poetry? After all, rules are made more for the convenience of critics than as a binding law for creators.
Remarks on a Bengali Translation of an English Poem
146
The poem you have chosen is not easily translatable. There is in it a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one — no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling — the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. This is high poetic style in its perfection and nothing of all that is translatable.
11.7.1931
Remarks on Bengali Translations of “Six Poems”1
147
Your translation of Shiva is a very beautiful poem, combining strength and elegance in the Virgilian manner. I have put one or two questions relating to the correctness of certain passages as a 
translation, but except for the care for exactitude it has not much importance.
A’s translation pleased me on another ground — he has rendered with great fidelity and, as it seemed to me, with considerable directness, precision and force the thought and spiritual substance of the poem — he has rendered, of course in more mental terms than mine, exactly what I wanted to say. What might be called the ‘mysticity’ of the poem, the expression of spiritual vision in half-occult, half-revealing symbols is not successfully caught, but that is a thing which may very well be untranslatable; it depends on an imponderable element which can hardly help escaping or evaporating in the process of transportation from one language to another. What he has done seems to me very well done. Questions of diction or elegance are another matter.
There remains N’s two translations of Jivanmukta. I do not find the mātrāvṛtta one altogether satisfactory, but the other is a very good poem. But as a translation! Well, there are some errors of the sense which do not help, e.g., mahimā for splendour; splendour is light. Silence, Light, Power, Ananda, these are the four pillars of the Jivanmukta consciousness. So too the all-seeing, flame-covered eye gets transmogrified into something else; but the worst is the divine stillness surrounding the world which is not at all what I either said or meant. The lines:
Revealed it wakens when God’s stillness
Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature,
express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and itself rendered calm and motionless by that over-vaulting influence. Nothing of that appears in the translation; it is a vague mental statement with an ornamental metaphor.
I do not stress all that to find fault, but because it points to a difficulty which seems to me insuperable. This Jivanmukta 
is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy. If one writes only ideas about what it is or should be, there is failure. There must be something concrete, the form, the essential spiritual emotion of the state. The words chosen must be the right words in their proper place and each part of the statement in its place in an inevitable whole. Verbiage, flourishes there must be none. But how can all that be turned over into another language without upsetting the apple-cart? I don’t see how it can be easily avoided. For instance in the fourth stanza, “Possesses”, “sealing”, “grasp” are words of great importance for the sense. The feeling of possession by the Ananda rapture, the pressure of the ecstatic force sealing the love so that there can never again be division between the lover and the All-Beloved, the sense of the grasp of the All-Beautiful are things more than physically concrete to the experience (“grasp” is especially used because it is a violent, abrupt, physical word — it cannot be replaced by “In the hands” or “In the hold”) and all that must have an adequate equivalent in the translation. But reading N’s Bengali line I no longer know where I am, unless perhaps in a world of Vedantic abstractions where I never intended to go. So again what has N’s translation of my line to do with the tremendous and beautiful experience of being ravished, thoughtless and wordless, into the “breast” of the Eternal who is the All-Beautiful, All-Beloved?
That is what I meant when I wrote yesterday about the impossibility — and also what I apprehended when I qualified my assent to the proposal for translation with a condition.
3.6.1934
Remarks on a Bengali Translation of a Poem of Shelley
148
Your translation of Shelley’s poem is vulnerable in the head and the tail. In the head, because it seems to me that your words are open to the construction that human love is a rich and precious thing which the poet in question unfortunately does 
not possess and it is only because of this deplorable poverty that he offers the psychic devotion, less warm and rich and desirable, but still in its own way rare and valuable! I exaggerate perhaps, but, as your lines are open to a meaning of this kind, it tends to convey the very reverse of Shelley’s intended significance. For in English “What men call love” is strongly depreciatory and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says in substance: “Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I cannot offer to you. But there is a greater thing, a true psychic love, all worship and devotion, which men do not readily value, being led away by the vital glamour, but which the Heavens do not reject though it is offered from something so far below them, so maimed and ignorant and sorrow-vexed as the human consciousness which is to the divine consciousness as the moth is to the star, as the night is to the day. And will you not accept this from me, you, who in your nature are kin to the Heavens, you, who seem to me to have something of the divine nature, to be something bright and happy and pure far above the sphere of our sorrow?” Of course all that is not said but only suggested, but it is obviously the spirit of the poem,— and it is this spirit in it that made me write to A the other day that it would be perhaps impossible to find in English literature a more perfect example of psychic inspiration than these eight lines you have translated.... As to the tail, I doubt whether your last line brings out the sense of “something afar from the sphere of our sorrow”. If I make these criticisms at all, it is because you have accustomed me to find in you a power of rendering the spirit and sense of your original while turning it into fine poetry in its new tongue which I would not expect or exact from any other translator.
11.7.1931
Difficulty of Translating Urdu Songs into English — Preference of Krishna to Rama
149
Your translations are very good, but much more poetic than the originals: some would consider that a fault, but I do not. The 
Urdu songs are very much in a manner and style that might be called the “hieratic primitive”, like a picture all in intense line, but only two or three essential lines at a time; the colour is the hue of a single and very simple strong spiritual idea or experience. It is hardly possible to carry that over into modern poetry; the result would probably be, instead of the bare sincerity of the original, some kind of ostensible artificial artlessness that would not be at all the same thing.
I have no objection to your substituting Krishna for Rama, and if Kabir makes any, which is not likely, you have only to say to him softly, “Rām Shyām judā mat karo bhāi”, and he will be silenced at once.
The bottom reason for your preference of Krishna to Rama is not sectarian but psychological. The Northerner prefers Rama because the Northerner is the mental, moral and social man in his type, and Rama is a congenial Avatar for that type; the Bengali, emotional and intuitive, finds all that very dry and plumps for Krishna. I suspect that is the whole mystery of the choice. Apart from these temperamental preferences and turning to essentials, one might say that Rama is the Divine accepting and glorifying a mould of the human mental, while Krishna seems rather to break the human moulds in order to create others from the higher planes; for he comes down direct from the Overmind and hammers with its forces on the mind and vital and heart of man to change and liberate and divinise them. At least that is one way of looking at their difference.
The English Bible
150
The English Bible is a translation, but it ranks among the finest pieces of literature in the world.
27.2.1936