On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

A SUGGESTION ABOUT A WORD IN

SAVITRI

AN AMERICAN DISCIPLE'S LETTER TO

MOTHER INDIA

February 13,1972

Dear Mr. Sethna,

A follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I have been a reader of Mother India since 1953 and have gained much from it. T have been an admirer of your writings in particular. An engineer in the fields of computer design and communications, I have degrees in philosophy and physics.

With the introduction out of the way, I would like to call your attention to a seeming error in Savitri. It occurs in the original two volume edition, and in the 1954 University edition. Perhaps it has been corrected since. The line in which the fault lies occurs on the same page of the latter edition, page 290, as these famous lines:

Or we may find when all the rest has failed

Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.[p. 256]

But the lines with which I am here concerned read:

Man then might rest content and live in peace,

Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked. [Ibid.]

Page 203

The above contains my correction of the passage. The book has "wants" for "once," which garbles the meaning. Although "wants" and "once" have only one letter in common, they are very close in pronunciation, suggesting that the error was made by a scribe taking dictation of the lines from Sri Aurobindo. Nirodbaran would seem to have committed a pun. Would you agree that my correction is fairly obvious wants seen, pardon me, once seen?

Sincerely yours, Robert Sharland

* * *

March 5,1972

Dear Mr. Sharland,

I was glad to get your letter, introducing yourself and suggesting "once" for "wants" in a line of Savitri. As the line occurs in that part of the poem which Sri Aurobindo had written and not dictated we were hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery by referring to his papers. On the face of it, it looked impossible that if the line were a written one anybody could have misread the word. So we suspected that Sri Aurobindo had expanded the passage in the days of dictation. And we were right. Nirodbaran found five new lines added and one of them was the bone of contention.

I agree with you that "once" makes very natural reading and that it should substitute the current word in all future editions. Thanks for being pundit enough to spot Nirodbaran's unconscious pun!

It's rather exhilarating to find that an engineer in the fields of computer design and communications or even that someone who has degrees in philosophy and physics is also such a sensitive reader of Sri Aurobindo's poetry on top of being a follower of him and the Mother. You have followed him very well indeed in this Savitri-passage!

Yours sincerely, K.D. Sethna

(Mother India, March 1972, pp. 92-93)

Page 204