Jivanmukta

Notes on the metres of the poems and their significance drawn from the letters of Sri Aurobindo

Jivanmukta

Written in Alcaics. These Alcaics are not perhaps very orthodox. I have treated the close of the first two lines not as a dactyl but as a cretic and have taken the liberty in any stanza of turning this into a double trochee. In one closing line I have started the dactylic run with two short preliminary syllables and there is occasionally a dactyl or anapaest in unlawful places; the dactyls too are not all pure dactyls. The object is to bring in by modulations some variety and a more plastic form and easier run than strict orthodoxy could give. But in essence, I think, the alcaic movement remains in spite of these departures.

The basic form of this Alcaic would run,

but with an opening to other modulations.

The subject is the Vedantic ideal of the living liberated man—jīvanmukta—though perhaps I have given a pull towards my own ideal which the strict Vedantin would consider illegitimate.

CWSA > Collected Poems > Six Poems (1934) - Note

On Bengali Translations of Shiva and Jivanmukta

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 some thing 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

These translations [of the line "Although consenting here to a mortal body"] only state what is true of everybody, not only of the jivanmukta. They have therefore no force. In the English the word "consenting" has a great force which makes the meaning of "He is the Undying" quite clear, viz. He is consciously that and his consenting to the mortal body does not diminish that consciousness—the consent being also free and quite conscious.

1934

Letters on Poetry and Art > On Some Poems Written during the 1930s

How to read the color-coded changes below? 1. SABCL version : lines with any changes & specific changes 2. CWSA version : lines with any changes & specific changes

NOTES FROM EDITOR

13 April 1934. There are four handwritten and two typed manuscripts. The typed manuscripts are dated “13.4.34”. The poem was published in the Calcutta Review in June 1934.