I see that you want to cry halt to our discussion of Sri Aurobindo as poet. Very well. But some points about your general attitude to poetry and certain aspects of Sri Aurobindo seem to call for some comment from me. First, the mixing up of the romantic with the sentimental. Surely, sentimentalism and romanticism are not synonymous? Highly romantic is Shelley's

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,

Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.

Our modern taste for stronger meat, the more direct, the more down-to-earth may not relish such a vision and you are likely to make a face at verbal turns like "love-laden" and "music sweet as love". But there is nothing intrinsically unpoetic about them and everything is caught up in a magical rhythm which is peculiar to Shelley. I would hesitate to dub the stanza sentimental stuff. To sentimentalise is to indulge in emotional weakness, mawkish tenderness. The phrases you pick out from the Priyumvada-passage are certainly of the romantic order - the whole story is cast in the romantic spirit, but such a spirit does not preclude the essence of poetry: measured language of moved precision. You emphasise a certain temper of expression which you find in those lines of Yeats. This temper, enabling things to be said "perfectly simply in plain English - in perfect dignity and grandeur", can yield fine poetry, yet to aver that other tempers cannot do so is to limit sadly "the realms of gold". Yeats's own style is not confined to a woman confessing -

A man if I but held him so

When my body was alive

Found all the pleasure that life gave.

Have you forgotten Early Yeats who has a man whispering-

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Beloved, let your eyes close, and your heart beat

Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,

Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest?

Here also is romantic poetry, but I don't believe you would charge it with being artificial and false or perpetrating "linguistic clutter". Does it satisfy your criterion of "nowness" if that criterion accepts only the manner of the three Yeats-lines quoted first? Perhaps you'll argue that the next three lines were written before your "now" appeared, belonging as they do to the volume Yeats published in 1899: The Wind among the Reeds. Well, Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death was written in 1899 too. If its style is not like work done in the generation when you started writing, it may not appeal to you personally, but what about judging poetry from an impersonal aesthetic standpoint - the same standpoint which would not shrink from Early Yeats and his Celtic Romanticism? Nor would you blame him because he is not putting his love-moment "perfectly simply in plain English". And is it possible that you would shrink from Keats's expression of the love-moment between secretly appearing Porphyro and just awaking Madeline? -

Beyond a mortal man impassioned far

At these voluptuous accents, he arose,

Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star

Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;

Into her dream he melted, as the rose

Blendeth its odour with the violet, -

Solution sweet....

I know we wouldn't write quite like this now, but our nowness in that respect shouldn't debar us from enjoying non-modern ways of the poetic art. There are numerous different ways to Parnassus and the direct mode of saying things which you favour to the exclusion of other approaches to a situation strikes me as self-impoverishment and critical

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misjudgment. Early Yeats and Keats write indirectly of the sex-act. Another kind of indirectness, an extreme of nothing save suggestion, a most delicate and moving fusion of speech and silence meets us in Dante's famous episode of Paolo and Francesca. Once during their period of unspoken and even unacknowledged love they read together the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Their eyes exchanged glances and their cheeks flushed. The book proved a tempter. And Francesca says to Dante no more than the words:

Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avante.

(Upon that day no further did we read.)

Quite a contrast on the one hand to Early Yeats as well as to Keats of the nineteenth century and on the other to Later Yeats of the passage you admire so much for its touching directness. And yet all the various statements are poetry. Sparing language or rich utterance is equally valid in creating poetry. If I went by your comment on the Priyumvada-passage and your absolute tilt towards what you consider contemporary practice, I would have to discard all poetry of the time before my own. And is your condemnation of Sri Aurobindo legitimate? The locutions you fall foul of - "well-loved", "overwhelming sweetness", "the voice loved to linger", "half-angered", "a lovely slave rebellious who had erred", "touches soft" - are all such as would tend to occur in most poets from Spenser down to the period of World War I. To frown on this sort of writing as being "linguistic clutter" is to forget the Blakean beauty that is exuberance. Can there be a greater master of "linguistic clutter" than Shakespeare whenever it would suit an occasion? For instance, hear the ghost of Hamlet's father:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

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And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine....

To come back to Sri Aurobindo: you are right to call the whole passage erotic and I am surprised at your imagining that Sri Aurobindo meant it to be "a new super-spiritual vision of love". I have pointed to "a sensuous felicity peculiar to Kalidasa" in it. Who would dream of ascribing anything "super-spiritual" to that supreme poet of artistic eroticism? The English critic Banning Richardson who reviewed at some length in The Aryan Path (March 1944) the two volumes of Sri Aurobindo's Collected Poems and Plays picked out Love and Death and the earlier Urvasie after writing: "These two volumes are rich in beauty and suggestiveness... Though the works are by no means of uniform quality - indeed what poet's are? - they reveal a true poetic spirit, and sometimes ascend to heights of great beauty and power. What will strike the English-speaking reader is the amazing mastery of the English language that the writer has attained." Richardson did not know of either Ilion or Savitri which were still unpublished, except for 380 lines of the former. He regarded Urvasie and Love and Death as Sri Aurobindo's greatest works, most abundant in imaginative expression, but he noted with a bit of regret that they were shot so much with erotic vividness. Nowhere did he impute to them sentimentalism. What is there along with the erotic element is an emotional idealism and either a sharp or a subtle delineation of the moods of the passionate heart. In one or two places we find a rare visionary power. But let me not diverge from my immediate concerns. They are connected with your sweeping misconstructions. The last one for me to underline is your fancy that "prostrate warm surrender" implies the sex-act. In normal custom how can the woman be "prostrate" in it? "Supine" would be the more appropriate word. But here it would be out of place. You will see why if you read the next phrase: "her flushed cheeks / Upon his feet." Not being Indian, you can't imagine

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a woman who, "half-angered", has "turned away" from her lover but who goes back to him with tender grace and, with her body in close contact with his, slides down to his feet and for a moment lies there with her warm face upon them, softly caressing them with her cheeks. Prostration is not looked upon in old-fashioned India as a humiliating act. It has deep associations. One prostrates oneself before the image of one's God, before one's Guru - and the traditional woman may do so before her husband in whom she feels the presence of the Divine. Of course in modern times much has changed, but Sri Aurobindo is dealing with a tale in the Mahabharata, filling out imaginatively what is merely hinted at there in a few lines. The sex-act, which you misread here, comes 16 lines later as a climax - and what a climax in a phrase at once forceful and subtle, suggesting the rapid breaths of ecstasy filled with a call to the beloved but unable to sustain it unshaken:

Bridal outpantings of her broken name.

It seems to me a pity that a woman of your sensitivity should fail to respond to the art of such a line. Just think how worlds away from the spontaneity and yet the surprise of it would be something like

Bridal outpantings that break down her name.

This would be a case of the effective obvious. The inspired cunning of the original would be gone. And if you realised that the way Sri Aurobindo has cast the phrase is a culmination of the art leading up to it you would try to discern how the psycho-physical presentation everywhere works with an inevitable skill. Take the line:

Or her long name uttered beseechingly...

There is the spondee of the second foot slowing down the

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voice. Then the inverted third foot - a trochee instead of the expected iamb - expressing impatient concern in speech. Then the four-syllabled final adverb echoing the sustained continuous plea which is signified." I may mention too the enjambment:

the weight

Of her wild bosom...

The word "weight" stands at the line's end with a cumulative finality, the important terminal position reinforces the meaning technically by giving it weight. The sense, however, flows over to the next line as if the heaviness implied by the word had to drop the sense into it. Kalidasa would have rejoiced at all this craftsmanship brought by the afflatus.

While regretting that you have missed the "minute particulars" of both the heart and the art of the passage, I wonder why you have said nothing about the two other passages I had quoted - one with a detailed observation of physical Nature, the next with a vehement articulation of a noble sentiment. Both deal with earthly life of which the Tagorean sparrow by which you set great store would be an organic element. Here as well as throughout the poem there is no straining after any "super-bird". Actually Love and Death mentions

Cuckoo and rainlark and love-speak-to-me

and

A peacock with his melancholy cry

Complaining far away,

and mentions how, when Ruru sat in stunned and still absorption after Priyumvada's death and old memories before her arrival into his life "kept with long pomps his mind / Excluding the dead girl" (not "maiden", as Yeats would have supposed),

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The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings,

Fanning him....

The poem, whose tale is set in very early times, closes on a bird-note in the ears of the lovers reunited after Ruru has offered half his life to get Priyumvada back from the Underworld:

...the earth breathed round them.

Glad of her children, and the koil's voice

Persisted in the morning of the world.

I may add that before this we have a scene in which

He looked and saw all grass and dense green trees

And sunshine and a single grasshopper

Near him repeated fierily its note.

Sri Aurobindo's eyes and ears were always on the earth, even earth's smallest things, and there was never a turning away as you conjecture. In fact he is the only spiritual figure in human history who insists that ultimately we do not have to turn away from earth for our fulfilment - a fulfilment always placed by earlier spirituality in a perfect Beyond where after terrestrial life we have to go. You, Tagore, William Blake one and all are of this supra-terrestrial outlook, no matter how much you may value sparrows and 'the eye of the peacock" and "our humble mother the dust" in the Creation which according to you and Blake was found good and was never sought to be made better by a God whose substance is ever different from it and can therefore be never truly incarnated here and even whose supposed incarnation is limited to a single instance in the whole of earth's history, a uniqueness which you yourself consider "indeed absurd" (as I am sure Tagore also, though not Blake, did). This rather incoherent blend of Christianity and non-Christianity, which is further complicated by a mixture

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with it of the Hermetic-Alchemical-Cabbalistic tradition of "As above, so below", you somewhat cockily pit against Sri Aurobindo's vision of God and Soul and Nature. No doubt, the doctrine which you have somehow elicited from this strange uneasy combination of diverse lights has a striking truth: "As above, so below." And I am in sympathy with you when you sum up: "It is when 'that which is below' becomes cut off from 'that which is above.' that the lower world becomes trivial and a nihil, and the world 'above' a vacuum." But surely what is below is not a perfect counterpart of what is above? The above is hidden in the below and gleams out only partially. Most people don't even catch glimpses of the "imprisoned splendour" (to use Browning's phrase). Poets are delighted by the wonder shining forth through slits in the shadowy surface and, when a mystical turn accompanies the poetic eye rolling in its fine frenzy, there is the Tagorean sense of the "unsurpassable", for really the divine secrecy which is the Infinite and the Eternal is the ultimate Truth, Goodness and Beauty. But Yeats has to confess -

Man is in love and loves what vanishes:

What more is there to say? -

and a greater than Yeats has concentrated his majestic sadness in a Latin line at once profound and pithy, whose poetry I have tried to convey with a dash of more colour than the packed original carries:

Haunted by tears is the world and our heart by the

touch of things mortal.

The "unsurpassable" which is seen in Nature and life is such only in essence: it cannot be equated wholly with the existence which it assumes and whose depths it pervades and whose surface it pierces at several points. Mystics who can plunge into those depths can live with a superb inner

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happiness, and often behold an aura of eternal and infinite light around "things mortal" and "what vanishes". The vision recorded by Traherne and by those who, employing more Eastern terms, have expressed themselves out of the "cosmic consciousness" is a proof of the transfiguration the world undergoes in mystic experience. Yet it is only the aspect of the world which is transfigured: the world's substance has not changed. The flawless Above is never literally and totally a flawless Below. Will this imbalance be always there and will the souls who want "one entire and perfect chrysolite" have always to leave "our mother the dust" for some Nirvana, Goloka, Heaven? "Alas, yes" is the answer. Have you read Tagore's poem on the Cranes? After he has caught sight of them in their migratory flight he sees in all things cranes flying and the message everywhere is: "Not here, not here but ever somewhere else!" It is to save us from this tragic message inevitable hitherto for our beloved earth that Sri Aurobindo has explored the Beyond, the world above, while yet never losing hold on the world below -

Type of the wise who soar but never roam,

True to the kindred points of heaven and home.

The saviour key to the spiritual-material deadlock down the ages is the plane of dynamic divinity which he calls "Super-mind", a power higher even than the Overmind whence so far all the greatest forces, including the revelatory Mantra, have hailed. There in an ultra-Platonic sense are the Arch-images of all existence, which are not only creative in the beginning but also transformative in the end. To bring them down here on earth to change it into a form of godhead and fulfil and not annul its lovely yet pitiful travail by living in the midst of its activity, contributing to its manifold march while attempting to reach and bring forth the inner and upper Plenitude: such is the aim of Sri Aurobindo.

Excuse my digression from our immediate concerns. I

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shall wind up now with a few more remarks. You must have received the letter in which I explained the true meaning of Sri Aurobindo's assertion that he was not primarily a poet. To have become greater than a poet is not to cease being poetic: if one is born a poet one remains so when the man in one has undergone a new birth. Perhaps my point will be illuminated from another angle if I quote to you a part of a letter of Sri Aurobindo's to Dilip Kumar Roy when Radha-krishnan wanted a philosophical article for a compilation:

"Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher - although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondi-cherry - I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher. How I managed to do it and why? First, because Richard proposed to me to cooperate in a philosophical review - and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher! (4.9.1934)"

Relevant to our subject, this shows that "primarily", in the connotation you read in the adverb, Sri Aurobindo had the poetic urge and the political drive.

Your remarks on that line of your own and on Shelley's West-Wind passage interested me. Exact imagery contributes to their poetic quality. The Vedic hymn to the wind has a certain vividness but except for the ending very little poetic-mystic significance in Panikkar's rendering.

You haven't said a thing about the poem I sent you as a test-case in the matter of highlight-words in spiritual poetry. Perhaps you want to spare my feelings or to avoid unnecessary discussion? As it is my own stuff 1 won't enter into any controversy. Just say your piece.

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Do you intend reading Ilion further? If even steeping yourself in it doesn't change your view, I'll stop pleading my case and leave you standing at the other pole to Herbert Read's enthusiastic response.

Now you may turn back to some older bones of contention - e.g., that Tagore poem on the answerless question. Also, if you feel like it, pronounce on my Mallarme book.

Let me thank you for the great pleasure you have afforded me of lively disputation on so large a scale about a theme so close to both our hearts: poetry.

(26.11.1987)

I've received the photo-copy of "A World-Poet?" This is the second time you've sent it. Now I have one to spare for circulation among friends who'll be much interested in the review.

From Kathleen Raine

I have at last finished reading 'The Obscure and the Mysterious' - in the run-up to Christmas you can imagine free time was limited. I have pondered it as I have explored with you Mallarme and his implications for poetry - the wonderful new perceptions which he explored - the affinity with Indian thought and how Sri Aurobindo saw him as the fountain-head of a 'future poetry'. It is a very fine contribution not only to the study of Mallarme but to the unfolding of poetry. You cannot imagine the density of materialism in this country at this time -

Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul whereas you in India see other vistas open to the Imagination. But the West in general (discounting the strong countermovement, of which Temenos is itself an expression) is 'sunk in deadly sleep', not believing that there is such a thing as the soul, let alone a spiritual order which the soul itself discerns. You have with great understanding seen, Mallarme's atheism notwithstanding, the actual perception

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of the universe of Blake's Imagination was possessed by him. I can see that a school of poetry in India might well look for its predecessors in the West among the symbolists, rather than among the Anglo-American reductionists of all to the crudest materialism. Sri Aurobindo saw that and let us hope he was prophetic. Of course that dimension has always cast its illumination on all true poets of the Imagination but it has been fatally lost in our time but for a few. Yeats also looked to the Symbolists and at the end of his poetic lifetime looked to India. The logic is clear and I hope indeed that there may be grounded in the work you yourself and Sri Aurobindo have done in this field which will flower.

I particularly have enjoyed your detailed readings of poems not only of Mallarme but of other poets - Yeats and Sturge Moore, you really see into poems in a way the academic critics, dissecting analysts, do not. To return into the world of Mallarme through your guidance has been a delight. I am a great Francophil, you know (or perhaps you did not) and have long been in contact with the school of the Imaginal' in France. For the Imagination, born in England with Blake and Coleridge and Shelley, and restored in the Irish renaissance of this century, has taken a new life in France, long deemed the 'rational' nation. On the contrary, white in positivist England the darkness deepens, in France there were the Symbolists, then the Surrealists, then Henry Corbin's school of the Imaginal' based on his studies of the Ismaeli poets and mystics; and Gaston Bachelard, and still Gilbert Durand and other followers of this tradition are doing fine work. Unfortunately, so far as I can discover, more in theory than the practice of poetry. I have published in Temenos critical writings by Sisir Kumar Ghose, and by Prof. Gokak, Kapila Vatsyayan, etc. and do find the Indian approach very congenial. I have a fine piece by Raja Rao in the next issue (he greatly admires Sri Aurobindo I know) and were it not that Temenos may end after twelve issues I would greatly like to invite a contribution. (But not on the poetry of Sri Aurobindo though I'd be glad to have a short

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piece on his view of poetry and the overmind etc. I wish he had not borrowed those 19th century Western terms like the overmind and the superman, carrying with them as they do associations with their origins.)

Now for some criticisms. As I read your book and your translations (whether your own or those of others) something became clear to me about one thing which seems to be wrong with Sri Aurobindo's verse from my standpoint, and that is that whereas he understands poetry in general, he has little sense of the precise - or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves. You also, who so well read the symbols in Mallarme's poems and understand their function, seem a little indifferent to precise uses of words. You throw into your translations words not used by the poet at all - I went through one chapter just marking a few - which 1 would regard as not permissible to a translator at all. This I feel is done because Indian-English is devoid of the resonances, the auras, the penumbras, the associations words have for English poets and readers with the whole language, one can't use a word without stirring these echoes and overtones. One of the disasters of the present time in England is that with the breakdown of education the language itself is being impoverished and destroyed because people no longer know the literature of our national inheritance. In a sense every poem is written not by an isolated poet but by a language - the language of the ancestors, not only in recorded literature but in the usages of a whole nation and depends therefore on history, on a whole culture. This is all being destroyed by the radio and television, the press, by commerce, which speak a language without a past, without resonances. 'Emptyings out of meaning' David Jones called it in Epoch and Artist. Thus I feel with Sri Aurobindo that with all his fluency in English - Indian users of English are sufficiently fluent - there is not a sense of these auras and overtones of the actual words. Images, symbols, are another thing, and Aurobindo has taught himself the metrics of certain English verse-forms, but his

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words are insensitive and used without much sense of their values. I don't mean simply music - though this too he lacks - and perhaps you also in writing of Mallarme and Yeats don't pay enough attention to the power of the sheer sound-music of their work. For example in a recent letter to me you cited a piece of Aurobindo and said (truly) that much early Yeats is also in the genre of romantic love poetry, but the difference - or one difference - lies in the music of such a poem as Yeats's The Rose of the World', 'Who would Go Ride with Fergus now', The Everlasting Voices', or from 'He bids his Beloved be at Peace'.

The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:

Beloved, let your eyes half-close, and your heart beat

Over my heart, your hair fall over my breast,

Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,

And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous

feet.

At nearly eighty the evocation of love means to me little or nothing any more, but oh the words! Who was it who said of Yeats that he took common words and 'knighted them'? So of course does Mallarme and the word magic of sound and association is the secret art of his work also, from which Yeats learned so much. Not what he says but how he says it.

Now to take you to task. P. 13, 'Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte" you render as Titaned night'. Where does that Titan come from? Not Mallarme. Why bring in Titans?

P. 14 'des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants' - why 'dawn-pure' as childhood's flesh. You will say it is the freshness of something young and new but 'dawn' is a word with a whole trail of other quite different poetic resonances and associations. It's not the idea but the use of words that I am pointing to. Or in the next line 'meadow-shroud'. To get a rhyme? But the introduction of the quite inappropriate word 'shroud' of which there is no suggestion in the French is inadmissible or 'choicely and richly proud'. Why 'choicely'

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and what does 'choicely proud' mean anyway? Or 'Winged with outflowing through the finite's mesh' is only a paraphrase not at all a translation of 'Ayant l'expression des choses infinies' and surely changes the meaning beyond what is permissible by the throwing-on of unnecessary and irrelevant words. Mallarme is economical in his use of words, as are all true poets. I could go on with many such examples, and it seems to me that the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language, and seems to be a blind-spot in your reading of him. Perhaps the best advice I ever received as a young poet was from Ezra Pound, on my one meeting with him - in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, outside Washington DC while he was still confined there - as I went up to him, he started on poetry straight away, saying he'd been reading a poem of mine which he liked, but added 'there are too many words performing no useful function'. He then went on to describe a former session with Richard Aldington, who had brought him a longish poem, and together they had gone through the poem taking out all words performing no useful function, and, Ezra concluded, 'at the end we had just two-and-a-half lines left'. Since then I have gone through my poems word by word weighing each word and removing those with wrong resonances - like 'shroud' in 'meadow-shroud' or 'dawn-pure' or Titaned night' and it's a pity Sri Aurobindo didn't have Pound to advise him. I would pass on Pound's wise words to young Indian poets. Or any other young poets. I believe it may be for India to produce a poet of the overmind but I don't find that Aurobindo, for all his insight into the possibility of such poetry, is that poet.

(11.12.1987)

From K. D. Sethna

Thank you for your letter of Dec. 11. I am replying immediately to catch you around Jan. 1 and wish you a happy new year on time. Your appreciation of The Obscure and the

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Mysterious is both sensitive and deep, responding as it does not only to my perception of the in-world from which Mallarme" drew his symbolism but also to my reading of the interplay of image and word and rhythm which constitutes his poetry as well as the poetry of others whose work I bring into relation with his.

I didn't know you were such a Francophil. My amour with French poetry does not extend to the most recent mood and mode of that belle of unwithering youth and infinite variety. I have heard of the 'imaginal' school but ail the names you list are unknown to me. I shall have to bring myself up to date. But you say that theory rather than practice of poetry has been developed in recent France. This means that the new spirits are still hung up in a brilliant mental air and have not touched the life-founts by which the earth can be enriched with a palpable new creation, the embodied inspired word.

Your general remarks on "precise uses of words" and "the associative magic of words" bring up a number of issues. One is the aim and method of translating poetry. No doubt, literalness is a great value, but what is greater is a poet's essential spirit and the typical turn of his style. Also there is the need of the metrical movement to echo something of the original's structure and span. Most important of all is to render poetry as poetry. Face to face with these vital demands on a translator, your charge that words are thrown in which are not used by the poet becomes rather trivial. If the words concerned are not mere padding but are in affinity with the sense and the sound, does it matter if they go a little beyond the actual message? Take that line of Virgil's - one of the world's peaks of inevitable poetic expression:

O passi graviora! - dabit deus his quoque finem.

The basic call is to convey in the translation its blend of majesty and poignancy, force and euphony. How does C. Day Lewis try to answer this call? Is there anything of the

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supreme message and music in -

Worse than this you have suffered. God will end all this

too.

My comment is:

Worse than so flat a pancake no translator has ever fed

us.

Listen now to Sri Aurobindo's version:

Fiercer griefs you have suffered. To these too God will

give ending.

I cannot think of any translation bringing out more finely the "world-cry" of Virgil's brief masterpiece. Whether Sri Aurobindo has thrown in something which is not directly there in the compact generality of the line's opening phrase would seem to me trivial quibbling. And can one say that the controlled intensity here as well as in the rest of the line shows any lack in "the sense of the precise - or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves"? Can any English writer offer us better poetry than this bit of what you may dub "Indian-English"?

You have returned to your old charge against us poor benighted English-writing Indians by saying: "Indian-English is devoid of the resonances, the auras, the penumbras, the associations words have for English poets and readers with the whole language, one can't use a word without stirring these echoes and overtones". And then you swoop down on Sri Aurobindo once more: "I feel ...that with all his fluency in English... there is not a sense of these auras and overtones of the actual words. Images, symbols are another thing and Aurobindo has taught himself the metrics of certain English verse-forms but his words are insensitive and used without much sense of their values. I don't mean

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simply music - though this too he lacks..." In contrast to Sri Aurobindo's being tone-deaf and colour-blind, as it were, in handling English locutions you remind me of Yeats's music and magic of words in the lines I quoted to you in my last letter as belonging to the same genre of romantic love-poetry as Sri Aurobindo's early verse in the narrative Love and Death. I am as charmed as you by Early Yeats and attach, even from the subtle spiritual standpoint, more importance to his wizardry than you do, who are enamoured rather of his lilt than of his vision, but I would wish you could awaken to the mastery of rhythm which, along with a keenness of sight, is just the thing most noticeable in Sri Aurobindo's early work of 1899. Sometimes I despair at the failure of your ear. Let me make one more effort to open it with a short passage from Love and Death. Ruru has descended into the Underworld in search of his prematurely dead Priyumvada. A moan of profound pity escapes him when he sees anguished ghosts drifting on "the penal waters":

"O miserable race of men,

With violent and passionate souls you come

Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days

In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams

Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;

Then from your spacious earth in a great horror

Descend into this night, and here too soon

Must expiate your few inadequate joys.

O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads

Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,

The naked spirit here. Oh my sweet flower,

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?"

Various tones of pathos and passion strike across a richly composite texture with a rhythm paced appropriately and subtle significant pauses - a tissue of art which is yet spontaneous as if the music of expressive blank verse came

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naturally out of the poet's imaginative seeing and feeling. May I draw your special attention to the last line's complex alliteration around an ever-changing vowel-play? As sheer sound it is for me a source of inexhaustible pleasure. To make your pulse respond better to the passage I'll cite a few lines of Tennyson that have some similarity of general theme and a touch of common phraseology at the start:

O purblind race of miserable men,

How many among us at this very hour

Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves,

By taking true for false, or false for true;

Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world

Groping, how many, until we pass and reach

That other, where we see as we are seen...

This is mostly prose set to metre and where the prosaic is exceeded we get a conventional poeticising except for the first line which has some genuine poetic drive and the penultimate which hasn't much of poetry but brings a little originality of contour. Put Sri Aurobindo and Tennyson side by side and you cannot help marking the difference. In the one the verse-body moves with an organic flexibility - in the other it is loosely articulated and goes shuffling. Nor does Tennyson have the vision-vitality, the art-intensity of Sri Aurobindo.

Please don't think I am offering the snatch from the Enid-story as characteristic Tennysonese. Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate has many finer moments. My purpose is just to throw into relief the poetic quality of the earlier Sri Aurobindo. And not only to show how a tragic view of life can arise with a living vibrancy from imaginative sight and emotion instead of somewhat tamely from a deliberate attempt to think, but also to illustrate a subtle word-music as satisfying as in Yeats though not in the same lyrical fashion which is always more easily seizable.

Even a haunting lyrical word-music in what I may term a

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super-Yeatsian vein I can waft towards you from Sri Aurobindo - and, surprisingly, from the later Sri Aurobindo whom you consider a dealer in abstractions. The vein is super-Yeatsian in two senses. One has to do with the lyricism of the utterance: the other concerns the nature of the symbol lyricised. The lyric cry is more inward-tuned -the rhythm comes from the planes which Sri Aurobindo describes as "overhead", not from the mid-worlds whose strains were transmitted by Early Yeats with an amazing fidelity. The symbol is that favourite of Early Yeats: the Rose - which we meet in a variety of suggestive forms in the Celtic Twilight: "a rose in the deeps of my heart" or with a vaster pervasion -

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the world!

or else

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose.

But Sri Aurobindo's Rose is more than a symbol of ideal Beauty and Love. As he once explained to a disciple, the poem Rose of God uses the rose as the most intense of all flowers to symbolise the divine intensities of Bliss, Light, Power, Life and Love. A stanza of four lines is given to each of the intensities. The first two lines everywhere are charged with the Glory that is on high, the Reality above the human consciousness, ever perfect and always manifest. In the last two lines the same Reality is invoked to reveal itself by evolution in the human consciousness and to become progressively a part of earth or, rather, to make earth progressively a part of it. What is eternally in bloom in the Divine is asked to blossom anew in our time and space - a Brightness that, unlike in Nashe's phrase, never falls from the air. Now read the fivefold apostrophe, as Yeats wanted his own incantations to be read - audibly yet softly and slowly, letting each word get its full sound-value and stand

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distinct before linking up with its companions in an intuitively patterned syntax. Listen to your voice with what the Upanishads call "the Ear behind the ear", for this poem is to be heard in an eminent and extreme degree by that in-dweller, the Artist Soul, who in one way or another is the ultimate audience of all true poetry:

Rose of God, vermillion stain on the sapphires of

heaven,

Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the

ecstasies seven! Leap up in our heart of human hood, O miracle. O

flame,

Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical

Name.

Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of

being,

Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing! Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery,

flower.

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the

marvellous Hour.

Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of

might,

Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the

night!

Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of

thy plan,

Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in

man.

Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine

Desire,

Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre! Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and

magical rhyme;

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Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless

the children of Time.

Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face, Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of

Grace!

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in

Nature's abyss: - Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life

beatitude's kiss.

At first glance one may get a little bewildered and think that here are splashes of oriental hues and a luxury of decorative effects for their own sake. But really there is no riot in the splendour: we have a many-sided system in it, exploring the secrets of the Divine Rose. A mystical metaphysics and psychology unfold before us in the succession of vibrant images. Esoteric, no doubt, some of the expressions are, but they come to us like the actual sight of unknown yet undeniable objects. They are esoteric as the amazing actuality of the Aurora Borealis may be designated esoteric when viewed by a traveller from southern latitudes to North Cape. If I could encroach on your time I would take you to close quarters with the occult significance of each line, unravelling the implicit metaphysics and psychology. But I assume that even without a detailed commentary one can stir to some glorious presence and purpose at work. To miss the sense of a supreme spiritual reality borne on the profoundly moving language and rhythm and to say that we are face to face with abstractions covered up by ornate phraseology is to be deaf and blind and numb.

Now to your taking me to task for certain details of the Mallarme-translations. I am certainly open to correction and would like to know where exactly 1 have erred and how you would propose to set me right. Some deviation from the original is at times due to exigencies of metre and form and may be regarded as "permissible" if the fundamental spirit

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still breathes through. You are inclined to attribute the inaccuracy or the superfluity to "Indian-English". But it is ironical that the one instance you pillory in some detail is not by an English-writing Indian. The translation of Baudelaire's Correspondances is by a pukka Englishman, a brilliant professor from Trinity College, Cambridge, John A. Chadwick, who got the name "Arjavananda" in the Ashram, There is no question of his suffering from any insensitiveness to the English language and its word-associations. Evidently he had a different idea from yours about translating poetry. Sri Aurobindo's comment on the rendering was: "This is a fine translation and it keeps, I think, much of the inner atmosphere of the original." I have seen the attempt of Richard Wilbur and Allen Tate to english the same sonnet. The former's version of Baudelaire's

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte

is:

Huge as the night and as the light of day,

which is close to the French but has hardly the power and the interpretative feeling of Chadwick's

Vast as the day's width or as the titaned night,

while Tate packs force into his rendering but by an elaboration which departs completely from the original:

Vast as the night stupendously moonlit.

He seems to have taken "la clarte" to refer to the light in the nocturnal sky and not have any connection with daytime. You object also to Chadwick's a "dawn-pure" and "meadow-shroud" and "choicely". Tate has "childhood's naked flesh" for Baudelaire's "chairs d'enfants" and converts the French poet's "verts comme les prairies" into "green as a studded plain". Wilbur turns into "rich, corrupt, profound" the

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original's "corrumpus, riches et triomphants". Baudelaire's

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies

appears in Tate as

Expansions to the infinite of pain.

which is unfaithful to the French besides lacking the poetic beauty of Chadwick's

Winged with outflowing through the finite's mesh.

You'll find all these departures from the original "not permissible" but you must have realised that none of them stems from any play of Indian-English. The "unnecessary and irrelevant words" are not in the least the sins of Indians following in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo, repeating any insensitive follies of his. The strictures you pass on me in connection with Correspondances, mistaking a pure Englishman for K. D. Sethna, and the condemnatory judgment you pronounce on my master in both Yoga and poetry - "the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language" - prove to be themselves "unnecessary and irrelevant words". What you call my "blind-spot" in my "reading of him" turns out - if the present context discloses your general tendency - to be a failure on your part to look at my literary retina properly and thereby failing to see eye to eye with me the true nature of Aurobindonian poetry.

Please forgive my saying that for all your splendid gifts and wide culture you have let certain preconceptions and prejudices sway you. Led by them you appear to be always on the look-out to pick fault, so that any stick seems good enough to belabour your bugbears. If I were to sum you up I would say: "K.R. is a mind of most admirable insights and very deplorable oversights."

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I notice also that you get carried away by certain formulas. The latest is: "All true poets are economical in their use of words." If you mean that true poets avoid words that are not "justes", you are right, but can this imply their being always spare and simple in their expressions? Surely, when you ascribe economy of words to Mallarme, you can't attribute simplicity to him? Were he simple, the title of my book, The Obscure and the Mysterious, would be a colossal misnomer. Spare he undoubtedly is at times, but can we declare him economical when he writes, for instance:

Son ceil, a I'horizon de lumiere gorge,

Voit des galeres d'or, belles comme des cygnes,

Sur un fleuve de pourpre et de parfums dormir

En bencant 1'eclair fauve et riche de leur lignes

Dans un grand nonchaloir charge de souvenir!

(His eye, engorged with the horizon-light,

Travels where galley on swanlike galley shines

Somnolent over perfumed purple seas

Rocking the rich fawn shimmer of ship-lines,

Huge nonchalance surcharged with memories!)

English poetry is chockful of both economical and lavish wonders. Francis Thompson's In No Strange Land may be rated economical but can anybody apply the same epithet to his Hound of Heaven? I don't know whether you have dipped into William Watson, a wrongly neglected poet according to me. He can bring a memorable economy wedded to a striking vision of la condition humaine:

Magnificent out of the dust we came

And abject from the spheres.

He can also sound an equally unforgettable note with an opulent grandeur of style:

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...And over me

The everlasting taciturnity,

The august, inhospitable, inhuman night,

Glittering magnificently unperturbed.

Let me give one more illustration. Here's Crashaw economically picturing Christ's incarnation through the Virgin Mary:

Christ left his father's home and came

Lightly as a lambent flame.

On the surface the couplet looks over-simple, rather conventional and almost verging on prose except for the metrical beat and the rhyme. On a closer reading it reveals its poetry along with its place in the seventeenth century among the Metaphysicals. The "home" hints at the Saviour's abandoning the heaven natural to him and entering the earth as an exile and a wanderer. But this entrance of the Divine into the world of human beings is suggested to be a soft secrecy, a movement delicate and refined. Such is the point of the adverb "Lightly" which prepares the gentle light which the closing phrase indicates. "Metaphysical wit" is at play here. It is implicit also in the adjective "lambent" with its subtle allusion to the common phrase about Christ: "Lamb of God." The cleverness, however, is unobtrusive and does not spoil the poetic spontaneity, the religious sincerity. Quite a contrast to the sweet economy of the couplet is the dynamic outburst of Hopkins on the same theme in two lines directly suffused with the glory, the profundity, the awesome loveliness of the incarnational event:

The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled

Miracle-in-Mary of flame...

The whole first phrase is opulently adjectival, qualifying a richly compound noun in the next. Of course, the words "of flame" go with "miracle" and not with "Mary": the incarna-

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ting Christ is the Miracle of flame, within Mary. A picture concrete in several different ways is driven into our minds. We see Jesus' origin in paradisal divinity, from where he has come missioned as at once force and grace, pressure of power and largesse of love; we see his love's acceptance of humanity and humanity's acceptance of him in love; we see his preciously secret birth through deeply and tenderly guarded virginity; we see the prodigious Godhead that was the unborn child lying with all its light and fire in Mary's quickened earth-womb. In place of the chastely lucid which the economy of Crashaw presented we are offered the passionately complex by a verbal lavishness which makes imaginative poetry of the highest order.

I don't know what Ezra Pound would have done with Hopkins's language. What he taught you was certainly worth learning. His pruning hand became rightly famous by the catching shape of novelty it gave to Eliot's Waste Land. From the anecdote he recounted to you I can guess that he proved to Richard Aldington the latter's almost zero possibility as a poet. By paring you down he freed the poetic consciousness in you from the glib versifier encumbering it. But to learn from so sensitive a critic nothing save a lesson in economy in the use of words is hardly to do him justice. Pound had a many-sided mind and your bringing him in apropos of the art of translation is not quite appropriate. We may remember that he had praise for Binyon's renderings of Dante which were far from being always tied down to your notion of the "permissible". Not only is Binyon "mannered" at times in a pseudo Old-English vein: he is also over-free occasionally. Thus Dante's most naturally grand

En la sua volontade e nostra pace,

which one may approximately render in metrical form

His Will alone is our tranquillity,

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comes out in Binyon with a bit of self-conscious quaintness:

And by His will is perfected our peace.

Pound cannot be identified with any such fetish as your emphasis on verbal economy. If he could be, he would have to turn his back on the multi-styled Shakespeare whom in my last letter to you I labelled as a master of what you, reacting adversely to one of the three passages I had culled from the early Sri Aurobindo, had misnamed "linguistic clutter". I gave an example from Hamlet. Perhaps your Pound would wag his beard in disapproval at the grandiose elocutionary excess of the third line in Macbeth's famous soliloquy after murdering King Duncan:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red...

Milton, too, with his frequent disdain of the Horatian maxim about art lying in concealing art, would fall under your mentor's ban. Does he not spurn economy of words when he tells us of Christ going forth with his attendants "to create new worlds"? -

They viewed the vast immeasurable Abyss

Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,

Up from the bottom turned by furious winds

And surging waves, as mountains to assault

Heaven's highth, and with the Centre mix the Pole.

The single-tracked figure you conjure of your early tutor, a critic preoccupied with one limited mode of artistic creation, I am tempted to stigmatise with the pun: "Penny-wise and Pound-foolish." In addition to appreciating Pound's impact on the litera-

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ture of the first few decades of the twentieth century, I have been attracted by his perceptive distinction of three classes of poetry, each of them perfectly legitimate: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logopoeia. Doubtless they overlap quite often, yet they can be distinguished by the predominance of one or another outstanding trait. In common parlance the three classes indicate poetry specially marked by either its music-making or its picture-making or its thought-making. If we question how thought-making can result in poetry we must note Pound's definition of Logopoeia: "It is the dance of the intellect among words." The term "dance" is vital, for, unless there are rhythm and harmony, posture and gesture along with the markedly intellectual theme, we cannot have living verse.

Are you aware of any choice by Pound himself of examples in each class? I have not come across them. My own preferences are many, but to mention them would draw me too far afield. I may pick out just a few short ones. There is Virgil's

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore

for both music and picture. Flecker has englished the line thus:

They stretched their hands for love of the other shore.

A fine rendering, but the purely verbal quality reinforcing the sense and the pathos in the Latin is rather missing. Although "stretched", with its intrinsically short e lengthened by being flanked by the voice-prolonging combinations of consonants, is admirable, it has no follow-up in technique to match the art of the original. The four-syllabled "Tendebantque" suggests the strain and the intensity of the stretching and the equally long or even slightly longer "ulterioris" carries home to us the farness of what is yearned for. Then there is the matchless Virgilian rhythm helped out

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by the freedom an inflected language allows of word-arrangement. Another favourite of mine is from Macbeth:

Duncan is in his grave.

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

A whole life-vision is caught here with both poignancy and resignation in a sound-pattern perfect in subtle communication. For a passage in which melopoeia and phanopoeia merge and reach their climax at the end I cannot do better than repeat the four lines I have quoted to you more than once of a dawn-moment physical and mystical at once:

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment's brink,

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

As an instance of logopoeia with phanopoeic touches, here is a fit offering from one past eighty to one approaching it:

Not as a tedious evil nor to be

Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,

But tranquil, but august, but making easy

The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time

Still batter down the glory and form of youth

And animal magnificent strong ease,

To warn the earthward man that he is spirit

Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,

Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is hound,

But called unborn into the unborn skies.

For body fades with the increasing soul

And wideness of its limits grown intolerant

Replaces life's impetuous joys with peace...

This is fluent and powerful blank-verse movement, end-stopped and enjambed according to significant need -

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thirteen verses with twelve pentameters and the penultimate line an alexandrine breaking through the general mould in answer to the meaning which plunges across its six feet.

How do you like my selections? May I expect some comments on them?

I am happy to receive the collection of your latest poems: The Presence. The title reminds me of three earlier lines of yours which perhaps sum up on both the positive and the negative side your life's vision of the sacred and the secular:

Behind the tree, behind the house, behind the stars Is the presence that I cannot see Otherwise than as stars and house and tree.

I'll write to you more about the book.

(26.12.1987)

From Kathleen Raine

This is not a reply to your long letter, but merely to acknowledge it and to add one or two reflections. And to wish you a Happy New Year.

One reflection is, that those who see beauty where others do not must always in that respect be right - as Shakespeare knew - he the great poet - 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse,if imagination amend them.' It is the invisible beauty behind the words that is the true poem, words are at best 'rough magic' and a mere approximation to vision. They are a marvel of magic, in fact, in their power of communicating knowledge of a myriad kinds, especially knowledge of intellectual and intangible feelings and moods and perceptions. Therefore I must submit to that argument that to find beauty is better than not to find beauty in a work.

Second reflection (this again from my standpoint of not finding Sri Aurobindo a poet): I see a comparison with that very remarkable Western visionary Rudolf Steiner, whose

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works I have also read with great interest and profit (I hope) especially those in which he develops Goethe's scientific ideas on plant-growth and form and on light and colour. These extremely valuable writings oh colour and light revolutionize the materialist Newtonian view, and derive ultimately I suppose from Plotinus; or at all events do correspond to a spiritual vision of a universe in which consciousness itself rather than 'matter' is the creative principle of all that is visible. Steiner painted many pictures which illustrate this realization about the nature of colour, but I don't know of any artist who would give them much value as works of art. Though I do know artists - including my own friend Winifred Nicholson - who certainly valued and used Steiner's ideas on colour.

I have asked my friend Jean Mambrino, poet and critic, who greatly admires Sri Aurobindo and much of his writing on poetry, as well as the Mother, (but who shares my blind-spot in relation to the poetic writings) to send you one of his collections of verse, and also his book of critical papers, Le Chant Profond. He may not be a great poet but he is a good one and deeply cares for poetry and all the things of the imagination.

As to my queries of the Mallarme translations - especially the Titan - it makes no difference whether the translator be an Indian or an Englishman, there are bounds which should be respected in the re-creation of a poem in another language. I agree with you about Cecil Day Lewis, who recited and read poetry with a most sensitive ear, but who was, like his friend Auden, devoid of the kind of imaginative resonance you look for in poetry - or if I may say so in all humility, I also. They were Marxists and the invisible worlds play no part in Marxist theories of the arts. The resonances of the imagination are absent from C. Day Lewis's translations. He was however I believe the first translator of 'Le Cimetiere Marin' and we at the time were all very excited about what was obviously a very wonderful poem. Up to a point. But the translator should not paraphrase the poem.

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and a few of the translations in your book do approach paraphrase. But it is a very good book and I read it with much delight, I hope I made that clear.

My final reflection is this. I now have seen a certain amount of Indian criticism of poetry - your own, Sri Aurobindo's, Sisir Kumar Ghose's, Prof. Gokak's, All is characterized (as one might expect) by an exceptional sensitivity to the subtle and imaginative dimension; hence your own feeling for Mallarme and the Symbolists, This at a time when in this country that dimension is as if non-existent for the academic critics as a whole, and there are remarkably few others around; Herbert Read was one of the last, and of course the poets themselves - Yeats and Eliot and Edwin Muir - were most perceptive critics. Materialism in the West has reached, one might hope, its nadir; but often I think -Shakespeare's words again - 'there is no worst'. You feel very strongly that Sri Aurobindo's poetry is of the 'overmind'. That is a reality which you look for in his poetry and in poetry as such; Tagore's 'poetry of surplus'. It may well be that India is destined to produce such a poetry - not necessarily in English, that world-language of the marketplace, the multinationals, the television-screen - but in what language it is no matter. If India experiences a poetic renaissance, it must surely be that it will be that kind of poetry you will contribute, and, heaven knows, at a time when the world needs such a vision. I hope it will be so.

In closing this letter - 1 have not at this moment the time to go in detail into the many questions you raise - may I thank you for the lines about Old Age. Are they your lines or Sri Aurobindo's? 'Spirit, dallying with transience'. Yes indeed. But peace? When there is little time left we must strive the harder, don't you find? I shall never reach spiritual enlightenment in the Indian sense, though the poet sees far off that vision. But I have never worked harder in my life, what with editing Temenos, writing papers for conferences, and sometimes when time allows a poem or two. I shall need several more lifetimes. Or if you like the one Self will need

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many more lifetimes. Are you indeed past eighty? It seems that time has in no way impaired your mind or lessened for you the 'impetuous joys' of the world of poetry.

In the time-consuming problems of getting Temenos 8 to the printer, seeing about advertisements, writing the new pamphlet etc. a longer letter to you must wait meanwhile.

(7.1.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

Thank you for your interim letter. A good part of it has both sweetness and light. I appreciate your reiterating that The Obscure and the Mysterious is a valuable as well as enjoyable book. Your estimate of the Marxist poets chimes with my own, though, like you, I have shared the excitement over C. Day Lewis's rendering of Valery's most famous poem. Even his translation of the Aeneid for broadcasting has given me pleasure on the whole. Much can be forgiven him for giving us the least inadequate version in English of Virgil's untranslatable "Sunt lacrimae rerum..." which I have already quoted in one of my letters. But one can't quite overlook his muffing several other wonderful snatches of the great Mantuan's art. To the example I gave in my last letter I would particularly add his treatment of the line which Arnold Bennett considered the most rhythmical in all poetic literature - the phrase Virgil put in the mouth of Aeneas when that hero voiced his helplessness before Dido's request for the story of Troy:

Infandum. regina, jubes renovare dolorem.

Day Lewis converts this mournful magic into:

O queen, the griefs you bid me reopen are

inexpressible -

a beginning good enough but a rather flat ending, devoid of

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what you happily term "imaginative resonance". Facing almost the impossible, I may try to echo the original with a somewhat more sensitive cadence than was heard on the BBC:

Words cannot utter, O Queen, the grief you bid me

rewaken.

This brings me to your remarks apropos of the Mallarme translations. As 1 wrote to you, I am perfectly open to correction in rendering this most subtle of poets, provided the critic realises in full the difficulty the translator is bound to face here. The ideal translator, according to Sri Aurobindo, is one who, like his disciple and my friend Dilip Kumar Roy, "can carry over the spirit of a poem, the characteristic power of its language and the turn of its rhythmical movement from one language to another", even "languages so alien in temperament to each other as English and Bengali". But such translators are, as Sri Aurobindo recognises, "not many". And he is ready to grant: "A translator is not necessarily bound to the original he chooses; he can make his own poem out of it, if he likes, and that is what is generally done." Again, Sri Aurobindo wrote to D. K. Roy, "Truly you are a unique and wonderful translator. How you can keep so close to the spirit and turn of your original and yet make your versions into true poems is a true marvel! Usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer." A further statement of Sri Aurobindo's may be quoted. Looking at Roy's version of two stanzas of Shelley - "I can give not what men call love", etc. - he pointed out how the translation was "vulnerable in the head and the tail" and after dealing with the shortcomings, he ended: "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

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poetry in its new tongue which I would not expect or exact from any other translator." Commenting on somebody's argument that a translator is not free to render a passage in a form not exploited in the original, -Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters!" Sri Aurobindo also allowed the license of translating poetic prose into poetry, adding: "And 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 ever made? And what of Tagore's 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 critics than for creators."

I gather from all this that the chief elements to be observed by the translator are the spirit and the sense. In a genuine translation as distinguished from a transcreation, these should not be sacrificed - and, insofar as they are organically linked to a particular type of verbal turn as in Mallarmean Symbolism, there should be an attempt at close reproduction according to the genius of the new language. In the mature Mallarme" such linking is mostly present. So I grant your point in this context that "the translator should not paraphrase the poem" and that, if, as you say, "a few of the translations... do approach paraphrase", I must plead guilty. In your running letter you have said you went through one chapter marking all the words which in your view were not permissible. It will be profitable for me to know them.

However, in the piece you specially picked out as a glaring example of errors, thinking it was by me when actually it was by John Chadwick, I am not quite convinced that in the line -

Vast as the day's width or as the titaned night -

seeking to translate

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Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte

the adjective for "night" is such a gross sin as you make out with the remark: "Where does that Titan come from? Not Mallarme. Why bring in Titans?" First of all, the original sonnet is not Mallarme's though Mallarme himself could have inspired the Titan-image by a line like

L'avare silence et la massive nuit.

The sonnet is Baudelaire's and he had a penchant for hugeness: e.g.,

Et cette immense nuit semblable aux vieux Chaos

(And that enormous night like Chaos old)

ou de gigantesque naiades...

J'eusse aime vivre aupres d'une jeune geante.

(I should have loved to dwell with a young giantess.)

I don't remember Baudelaire to have used "titanique" or "titanesque" anywhere but it is curious how he easily evokes such an epithet in the minds of his translators or admirers. Thus Edna St.Vincent Millay elaborates his "de gigantesque naiades" into

Tall nymphs with Titan breasts and knees

and Swinburne, in his famous prematurely composed elegy on Baudelaire's death, Ave atque vale, has the lines:

Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet

Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover...?

Perhaps you are over-finicky with Chadwick's imaginative liberty with the original?

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In any case, what I was directly concerned with in my letter was not the issue of translation as such. There your defence that your mistaking an Englishman for an Indian does not essentially matter can stand, for then the issue is merely, as you put it: "there are bounds which should be respected in the re-creation of a poem in another language." An Englishman may overstep these bounds just as flagrantly as an Indian. But your defence sidesteps the real point of my contention. Apropos of the translation by Chadwick which you took to be mine you remark that here there is "the throwing-in of unnecessary and irrelevant words" and you add: "...it seems to me that the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language" and you compare my use of it in the translations to "one thing which seems to be wrong with Sri Aurobindo's verse from my standpoint, and that is that whereas he understands poetry in general he has little sense of the precise - or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves". Further, in your eyes, what I have done in my translations and what Sri Aurobindo does in his own work "is done because Indian-English is devoid of the resonances, the auras, the penumbras, the association words have for English poets and readers with the whole language; one can't use a word without stirring these echoes and overtones". The mistake in your argument lies in catching hold of an Englishman's work and applying to it your charge against Indian-English and relating this work to Sri Aurobindo as well as to all of us Indians attempting to write poetry in English. Here is a real whopper of a slip on your part. It betrays the urge to give us a whipping on any pretext. Whatever appears to come to hand serves you to run down Sri Aurobindo in particular and his school of Indian poets in general and by implication all Indo-English poetry. A sweeping obsession rather than any clear and patient perception is at play, as if it made no odds whether the occasion were truly pertinent or not. Just the belief that something is written by an Indian is sufficient to trigger an anti-Aurobindo judgment from you.

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Probably you will argue back: "Chadwick, simply by being an Englishman, need not be above insensitiveness to English word-values. Not all Englishmen have the required insight into them. And, failing to have it, Chadwick could perpetrate Indian-English, like Sri Aurobindo and his ilk. So my attack on Indian-English can be valid despite Chadwick's nationality."

I don't think this argument holds water. To assume Chadwick's "Indian" insensitiveness is pure fancy. He was a highly developed, widely literate, finely imaginative mind with a great command of his own language. His compatriot Ronald Nixon (known in Yogic circles by the name "Sri Krishna Prem"), himself endowed with an admirable literary and philosophic sensorium, has spoken - in his introduction to Chadwick's works - of "the delicate dream-like beauty" of the poems as well as of their dealing "with the mysteries of the inner life". Passing beyond the bounds of permissible liberty in translation is not to cease being the mind that Chadwick was. In a recent letter to the TLS (December 11-17, 1987, p. 1377) you imply essentially what Sri Aurobindo has said about translations. You say: "No translation, of course, can ever equal the original, yet there have been great translators who have, as it were, transposed some original into what is in its own right fine poetry - one has but to name Chapman's or Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, Arthur Waley's Chinese poems, all of which have had a deep impact on the English language. Many excellent translations have done less than this but have brought something of the original - Leishman's Rilke, Eliot and others who have translated St. John Perse in such a way as to make a shining contribution to the art of translation." Surely Chapman or Pope or Dryden, in their remarkably successful compositions, cannot be considered truly "faithful" to their models and yet they have achieved genuine poetry. Chapman in particular has come in for praise. But an Elizabethan rhythmist like him of explosive and complicated splendour can never be Homeric in the ultimate sense. For

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one thing, the controlled power of the epic style, whether simple or ondoyant, whether Homeric or Miltonic, cannot be caught by the Romantic temper that pervades Elizabethan verse. Chadwick, by his non-observance of the bounds to which you refer, would not ipso facto fail to be a genuine poet with a sensitive eye and ear in his own manner of English expression. Departing in places from the verbal form of Baudelaire (or Mallarme, as you thought) he can still -achieve authentic poetry and even convey the inner spirit of the celebrated French sonnet, Correspondances. Or take William Radice on whose behalf you penned the TLS letter. What he has done for Rabindranath Tagore is essentially nothing different. He has created a profound impression on you just because his versions have true poetic power and convey the imaginative richness and depth of the Bengali master in really inspired language. It is not that he has anything of the music which is peculiar to Tagorian Bengali - a gift as of a "Gandharva" incarnate, a transmission to our world of a celestial strain proper to a specific non-human plane known to Indian occult lore, a plane of super-euphony beyond the verbal traffic of the earth at even its most harmonious. 1 am certain our friend Sisir Kumar Ghose would tell us of the liberties Radice has taken and how the absence of the Bengali rhyme-schemes must tell in the total effect of the expressive inevitability in spite of Radice's skilful choice of metres broadly equivalent in English to those in Bengali. What counts on the whole is the poetic quality of the rendering in regard to both the overall vision and the details of interpretative sight. I contend that Chadwick's sonnet is good poetic stuff in itself besides communicating, as Sri Aurobindo says, much of the inner atmosphere of the original - no matter how some minutiae of phrasing may import different visual suggestions here and there. These suggestions may, to a surface look, appear non-Baudelairian in scattered places, but by themselves they cannot imply any lack of the linguistic resonances, etc., one would expect an Englishman of Chadwick's stature to be

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aware of. Even if the poetry did not quite come up to the mark for some reason or other, the natural English sense of them in individual phrases and lines would be at work. By no means can the charge of "Indian-English" as conceived by you be laid at his door. As soon as you thought an Indian (I, in this case) had rendered Correspondances the bee in your bonnet on "Indian-English" started buzzing and stinging indiscriminately - with Sri Aurobindo brought in at all costs and made the fundamental victim.

To introduce associations which are alien to Baudelaire in some respect is to be more free in translation than you are prepared to allow. It does not mean that the translator is using words without a proper sense of them, nor does it unpoetise the language as such. You have yourself guessed the poetry of "dawn-pure as childhood's flesh" - namely, "the freshness of something young and new". Merely because the idea differs from "des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants", we don't get a kind of verse which is poor in imaginative resonance. Perhaps what most sticks in your gullet is the expression "meadow-shroud". You protest: "the introduction of the quite inappropriate word 'shroud' of which there is no suggestion in the French is quite inadmissible..." I wonder if you realise what this word connotes here. The first thing you must have thought of is "winding-sheet, garment for the dead" or else "a concealing agency". Looking at the whole phrase - "green as meadow-shroud" — one should get clean beyond the common associations. Chadwick was a sort of word-fancier. In several of his poems he revived beautiful or striking neglected terms, sometimes dialectal, such as only a mind steeped in all the shades and grades of English speech could exploit to poetic effect. To conceive of him as lacking in awareness of linguistic auras and penumbras and associations and to pick him out as an exemplar of "Indian-English" running riot would be indeed a piece of gaucherie. If you consult the OED you will find among the very first significances of "shroud": "vesture in which the world or the things of

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nature are clothed." An illustration is in Chaucer's Romance of the Rose, 64:

And then bicometh the ground so proud

That it wol have a newe shroud.

Obviously, what Chadwick's "meadow" is clothed in and what makes it "green" thereby is grass. It may be a roundabout way of echoing "verts comme les prairies", but we can't fault it on the score of poetry proper. And how from an over-free English treatment of a French original do we get on to Sri Aurobindo's own original work in English? By hook or by crook he must be made out a poetaster!

(By the way, there is a misprint in my book's reproduction of Chadwick: "vista's gloom" should read "vista'd gloom.")

Now a new attempt with the same purpose of debunking Sri Aurobindo pulls Rudolf Steiner into the picture. The reasoning goes: Steiner. for all his being a remarkable visionary and a valuable developer of Goethe's ideas on plant-growth, form, light and colour, was yet no great shakes when he painted many pictures to illustrate his realisation about the nature of colour: similarly Sri Aurobindo, though an outstanding spiritual figure, made a poor show in the poetry in which he sought to express his mystical vision and experience. In a letter to Kishor Gandhi you even compared Sri Aurobindo to Pope John Paul II who, though reckoned a holy man, can make no impression with the verses he writes. Here is just the general principle that one who is eminent for his high inner life is not necessarily successful in channelling it into art. But you forget that there is no intrinsic impossibility in combining art with holiness or visionary inwardness. So the argument by analogy from the exponent of Anthroposophy or the Head of the Catholic Church carries no convincing force. Besides, the comparisons betray little insight into Sri Aurobindo's achievement in supernormal consciousness. You might as well speak of the avatars and rishis and prophets in the same

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breath as Steiner or the present occupant of the Vatican. Furthermore, the ranges of occult and spiritual being attained and explored by a master Yogi like Sri Aurobindo are precisely those in which the mysterious founts of great art lie, so that if one has already an artistic turn one is very likely to find it enhanced and even supremely activated. These are the ranges from which the Rigveda's mantras, the Upanishads' slokas, the Gita's srutis - the most glorious utterances of poetic spirituality - have issued. And when we read The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and the countless letters to Yogic aspirants we discover a body of unparalleled knowledge of the hidden dimensions of existence, an intimate sight of superhuman planes and an exploration of their details, a familiarity with their soul-scapes, their denizens, their creative potencies such as you come across nowhere else in the world's literature of religious, occult, spiritual realisation. Where except in Sri Aurobindo does one find precise and extended accounts not only of the in-worlds but also of the worlds above the mental level - the "overhead" planes which Sri Aurobindo distinguishes and describes as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition. Overmind and, beyond the last-named, the still unmanifested Supermind which is the dynamic face and front of the utter Absolute? Isn't there the greatest possibility, the utmost probability, that the genuine poetry of the Spirit, even the sovereign inevitability of the Overmind where the ultimate springs of all poetic speech are to be traced, should have its outlet in one who lived continuously both in the in-worlds and in the over-worlds, one whose consciousness had broken through the limits of the human ego and was at home at once in the Cosmic and the Transcendental, not only in the static Self of Selves but also in the crowded immensities of the active Godhead, the expressive Superconsciousness whose Words are Worlds? Isn't such an outlet very much on the cards in at least some part of the amazingly prolific and varied work of one who was reared on the masterpieces of verse in many western

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and eastern languages and who, speaking and thinking in English from early boyhood in England up to his twenty-first year there, had himself the poetic urge throughout his life of English-writing? I hope you will understand how irrelevant and inappropriate is any analogy from Steiner or Pope John Paul 11.

I am glad you were happy with the lines about Old Age. They are another excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's narrative of 1899, Love and Death. Naturally they go home to people like us who can't help wondering how long we shall continue being "Spirit, dallying with transience"'. Yes, indeed I am a little ahead of you: I completed my eighty-third year on last November 25. Neither of us has lost the "impetuous joys" of youth so far as poetry is concerned and youth is with us also in point of energy. You must be surpassing me there, what with "the time-consuming problems" you mention. But why do you hold that the peace of old age which those lines speak of is out of your reach? Activities such as yours need not come in the way of the state Sri Aurobindo hints at in Savitri:

A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest

Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

Perhaps you will repeat as a reason for not having peace: "I shall never reach spiritual enlightenment in the Indian sense, though the poet sees far off that vision." The second part of this sentence provides for some reflection of the profound calm that spiritual enlightenment brings as one of its boons. What must help that reflection is the disclosure you make apropos of the lines of Yeats's you quoted in your letter of December 11: "At nearly eighty the evocation of love means to me little or nothing any more..." I am reminded of Sophocles who said on his eightieth birthday: "At last I am free of passion." The case was quite different with Hugo and Goethe. Around eighty Hugo was still a

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skirt-chaser, and Goethe at that age had his last heart-flutter over a girl of eighteen although he had also the glorious intuition, half Sufi half Tantric, with which the second part of Faust closes:

Das Ewig-weibliche .

Zieht uns hinan,

which may be rendered:

The Eternal Feminine

Is leading us upward.

Goethe's uplifting as well as penetrating phrase brings to my memory the figure of Sri Aurobindo's co-worker, the Mother of our Ashram, and I am led to quote to you two passages from an article I wrote on her in 1958:

"On February 21 she completes her eightieth year. It would be the extreme of ineptitude to say she is eighty years old. Timeless is she not only in her inmost being but also in all the expressions of it in her outermost activity. Few of her disciples are up in the morning as early as she, and few turn to repose as late. It is hardly four or five years ago that she used to be on her feet, without a moment's respite, from five in the morning to nearly two in the afternoon - meeting people, ministering to their spiritual needs, considering their physical requirements, attending to the reports of numerous departments, giving flowers charged with the soul's secrets, making those secrets breathe out more sweetly with that flower of flowers, her smile. In the evening again, from four she would be active, with a little recreation by way of tennis for an hour and then with a large amount of re-creation of lost joy or clouded light in the thousand disciples who would move past her for a couple of hours to receive from her hands a nut or a sweet through which their very bodies could absorb grace. Even today, her manifold activity is of one who is ever young, and at the day's end there is none who

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leaves the Ashram Playground with a fresher face and a lighter step.

"Watching her, day after day, we realise that more than mere words are what she once spoke oh old age. She said, in effect: 'The coming of old age is due to two suggestions. First, the general collective suggestion - people telling you that you are getting old and can't do one thing or another. There is also the individual suggestion which keeps repeating, I am getting old, I mustn't attempt this or that. The truth is quite different. Before thirty, the energy goes out in a spendthrift way because of the play of impulses. After thirty, there is a settling down and one is expected to have a plenitude of energy. At fifty, blossoming begins. At eighty, one becomes capable of full production..' "

I shall end on this note, only adding two points. First, Jean Mambrino has sent me four books of his which I shall thankfully acknowledge soon. A friend of mine here is very much interested in Temenos and wants to know whether it is a quarterly, six-monthly or yearly.

With the warmth of the heart's friendship which always accompanies the heat of the mind's quarrel I close.

(18.1.1988)

From K. D. Sethna

This letter has nothing to do with our discussion. It records a dream or rather the part of a dream which has stuck in my memory.

A little before 4 a.m. this morning - which means about 11 p.m. of the previous day in London - I seem to have met you on a subtle plane. The meeting was extremely vivid and very friendly. You have with you some books and a few personal articles, of which I can remember only a comb. With these things in your hands you pass from one room to another, with me accompanying you. We chat about a book-review in the TLS. You remark that the TLS has four Indian reviewers on its staff and that a linguistic characteristic of

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theirs is the word "whatsoever." spelt with a hyphen after "what" and "so". I mention a book-title, which you fancy: "Dalliance with eternity." Then I tell you the source of it - a couple of lines which, as I remind you, I have already quoted in one of my letters:

White chambers of dalliance with eternity,

And the stupendous gates of the Alone.

There is a smile of satisfaction on your face. I tell you that these lines recall a phrase from those on Old Age I recently sent you: "Spirit dallying with transience" - a phrase with which you were particularly pleased out of a passage the whole of which had made you happy.

After exchanging some more words we go back to the first room. But, before you come there, you open a box of mine and, taking a hair-brush from it, pass it over your own hair. I am at the same time surprised and glad at this gesture. Then I wake up and look at the clock on my bedside table. It shows exactly 4 in the morning.

Fearing lest 1 should forget the details of the dream-meeting if I fell asleep again, I got out of my bed and noted them down on a piece of paper. They may appear trivial except for the literary strain in them bespeaking a deep-ingrained trait in both of us. What has impressed me even more than this is the closeness between us. There was no sense of any controversy lingering. Even now, while I am typing I am aware of your presence almost physically and find it very congenial.

(30.1.1988)

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