Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
On Some Poems Written during the 1930s

On Bengali Translations of Shiva and Jivanmukta [1]

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.

Anilbaran’s translation [of Shiva] 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 Nishikanta’s two translations of Jivanmukta. I do not find the mātra-vṛtta 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 applecart? 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 specially 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 [Nishikanta’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 [Nishikanta’s Bengali 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 Nolini’s proposal [to print Bengali translations of the poems] with a condition.

3 June 1934