Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

TWO ILLUMINATIONS FROM ILION

A great poem illuminates many areas of art and life, provides insight into a number of technical problems and psychologico-cultural issues. I may bring forward two instances of such help from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion. Both have nothing quite directly to do with the central subject-matter or the poetic working out of it; but they are highly relevant to the field of poetry in general and to certain confrontations of self and world emerging today.

I

The Problem of Translating Homer

Sri Aurobindo has framed a theory of what he calls true quantitative verse in English and amply illustrated it with nearly 5000 lines unravelling the greatest knot of the difficulty: the hexameter. His theory, which he designates "realistic", can be summed up in its whole base with four rules or sets of rules:¹

"(1) All stressed syllables are metrically long, as are also all long-vowel syllables even without stress.

"All short-vowel syllables are metrically short, unless they are lengthened by stress—or else by a sufficient weight of consonants or some other lengthening sound-element; but the mere fact of more than one consonant coming after a short vowel, whether within the word or after it, or both in combination, is not sufficient to confer length upon the syllable. Heaviness caused by a crowding of consonants affects the rhythm of a line or part of a line but does not alter its metrical values.

¹ Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. II "On Quantitative Metre", pp. 340-41.

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"Each word has its own metrical value which cannot be radically influenced or altered by the word that follows.

"(2) The English language has many sounds which are doubtful or variable in quantity; these may be sometimes used as short and sometimes as long according to circumstance. Here the ear must be the judge.

"(3) Quantity within the syllable itself is not so rigidly fixed as in the ancient languages; often position or other circumstances may alter the metrical value of a syllable. A certain latitude has to be conceded in such cases, and there again the ear must be the judge.

"(4) Quantity metres cannot be as rigid and unalterable in English as in the old classical tongues; for the movement of the language is pliant and flexible and averse to rigidity and monotone. English poetry has always a fundamental metrical basis, a fixed normality of the feet constituting a line; but it relieves the fixity by the use of modulations substituting, with sometimes a less, sometimes a greater freedom, other feet for the normal. This rule of variation, very occasionally admitted in the classical tongues but natural in English poetry, must be applied or at least permitted in quantitative metres also; otherwise, in poems of some length, their rhythms may become stereotyped in a too rigid sameness and fatigue the ear.

"No other rule than these four need be laid down, for the rest must be left to individual choice and skill in technique."

With the advent of the Aurobindonian hexameter in tune with the genius of English as well as catching the temper of the classical medium, the vexed question of translating Homer into truly responsive English verse has received at last an answer. Interestingly enough, in his early days Sri Aurobindo himself attempted a set translation of the Odyssey.¹ But he did not carry on and what remains is only a few opening passages, and these

¹ More Poems (Pondicherry, 1957), pp. 49-50.

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too in a rough unrevised draft. The first ten lines seem the best and we may quote them for their cumulative effect of the Homeric "how" of saying things:

Sing to me, Muse, of the man many-counselled who far through the world's ways

Wandering was tossed after Troya he sacked, the divine stronghold.

Many cities of men he beheld, learned the minds of their dwellers,

Many the woes in his soul he suffered driven on the waters,

Fending from fate his life and the homeward course of his comrades.

Them even so he saved not for all his desire and his striving;

Who by their own infatuate madness piteously perished,

Fools in their hearts! for they slew the herds the deity pastured,

Helios high-climbing; but he from them reft their return and the daylight.

Sing to us also of these things, goddess, daughter of heaven.

From the artistic viewpoint the Odyssey is a particularly difficult poem to translate; for, has not Sri Aurobindo spoken of "the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions" to the fact that all the great epics achieve greatness in spite of "deficiencies if not failures" in them?¹ The proper form to keep the needed inspiration winging as intensely as possible is all the more required. And, from the lines quoted, one may see the appropriateness of the form chosen. The opening pair may be briefly commented on.

The first is trisyllabic in all the five feet preceding the final one, but with no mechanical regularity. They broadly indicate

¹ Life, Literature, Yoga (Pondicherry, 1967). p. 104.

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the lengthy labour of varied journeying undergone by a particular individual noted for certain qualities. But in two places the indication is brought to a significant head, as it were. While "Sing to me" and "Muse of the" and "counselled who" are each a dactyl (long-short-short), the third foot—"man many" —is, by Sri Aurobindo's system, an anti-bacchius (long-long-short) in which quantitative length is created purely by stress-strokes: it metrically dwells on the hero's multi-aspected competence of mind, packs home his weight of wisdom and subtly suggests his fitness for what he was made to do. Again, what he was made to do is rendered equally living by a special effect in the fifth foot—"far through the"—which balances the third by immediately coming on the heels of the whole phrase dealing with the man concerned. This also is an anti-bacchius but mainly by an intrinsic quantitative stretch-out and it climaxes the suggestion of the sustained movement across space and time by the hero. The line's sixth foot—"world's ways"— is an emphatic spondee, a couple of syllables not only having a long or lengthened vowel but also bearing stresses and conjuring up with a culminating precision a sense both of the wide persistent travel and of the deep diverse travail. Here we may note in addition the alliterative w's and proceed to mark the picking up of the alliteration by the opening word of the next line: "Wandering." Not merely is the idea of continual going hither and thither upon land and sea enforced: a sound-support is given to the significance by the triple repetition of the letter w which has a certain expansive effect well-known to the sensitive poetic ear, as in Wordsworth's

the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

and Sri Aurobindo's

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In the wide workshop of the wonderful world.

The line starting with "Wandering" links up rhythmically with its predecessor through a single anti-bacchius once more— "tossed after"—as well as by a dactyl ("Troya he") in the third foot. But the initial foot ("Wandering was") is a first-paeon (long-short-short-short) which, coming immediately after the preceding line's anti-bacchius and spondee, adds another shade to the motif of travel and travail—a movement with a pressure plunging as if into thin air again and again. The second line closes with three dissyllables—the first a natural trochee, the second a spondee by an accent-shift to the first syllable such as English scansion practises with some words and by an intrinsically long accent-deprived second syllable, the third foot a spondee yet a little different from the one before it no less than from the terminal of the opening line, being stressed only in the first of its two intrinsically long components: "sacked the / divine / stronghold." Nor is this trio of dissyllables a mere variation: it meaningfully covers the mention of the past magnitude of the city Odysseus left in ruins before he started tossing to and fro. The rhythmic pace is slowed down and at the end brought to a standstill with the very word connoting the original firm-foundedness of Troya which had been built by Apollo's art. Quite a host of expressive effects are set together, interacting among themselves within a billowy sweep and swirl whose changing rhythms, for all their separate roles, are basically harmonious as in Homer's original.

Unaware of the right mould found by Sri Aurobindo, a writer in the Times Literary Supplement "There is no equivalent between a metrical six-foot line [i.e. the quantitative hexameter] and one dependent on stress, but the technique

¹ "The Masks of Homer", col. 3.

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developed by Mr. Day Lewis and Professor Lattimore has proved more successful than most...." Now, to have a true measure of the claimed success we have only to take the reviewer's quotation of Lattimore's rendering of the first line of Homer's famous passage in the Iliad about the descent of Apollo to avenge the Greeks' insult to his high-priest Chryses:

Be de kat' oulumpoio karenon choömenos ker.

Lattimore writes:

And strode down along the pinnacles of Olympos, angered in his heart...

Sri Aurobindo, in the course of discussing certain Homeric habits—stock descriptions, epithets always reiterated, lines even which are constantly repeated again and again when the same incident returns in the narrative—happens to quote the very phrase and to English it:

Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings.

Sri Aurobindo has sacrificed strict literalness at the end but the fundamental Homeric spirit and sound are there—and perhaps all the more by that extra poetic touch to match the Greek splendour of word. In Lattimore we feel a smothering of the needed qualities. Day Lewis has not tried his hand at Homer, but we have his very readable Virgil, with some excellent responses in places yet lacking the sense of the right body to make such responses organic to the inspiration. We may test him in one of Virgil's most memorable moments, which Sri Aurobindo too has translated in passing, while helping a disciple

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in the art of the caesura. Virgil, in the midst of describing a storm and the wreck of the ships of Aeneas, breaks into a line of universal appeal, the soul of all humanity speaking poignantly and profoundly:

O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem.

Lewis gets something of the poignancy but it is not verbally subtle enough or rhythmically keen enough to cut down into profundity:

Worse than this you have suffered. God will end all this too.¹

Listen now to Sri Aurobindo:

Fiercer griefs you have suffered; to these too God will give ending.

The world-cry is here in its full resonance. No doubt, a greater poetic voice is in action, but it secures the supreme Virgilian fulfilment by finding for the Latin verse's absolute inevitability the right metrical mould in English.

Wherever Lewis strikes upon that mould by poetic instinct he brings off the right hexametrical note, as in rendering Virgil's

Prospexi Italiam summa sublimis ab unda

by

Caught sight of Italy, being lifted high on a wave crest.²

¹The Aeneid of Virgil, translated from the Latin by C. Day Lewis (The New English Library Ltd., London, 1962), p. 6, line 199.

²Ibid., p. 129. line 357.

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There we have in the initial anti-bacchius a natural Aurobindo-nian modulation which would be absent from the common English imitation of Virgil's form or would have to be artificially passed off as a dactyl. Much more of this success would have been present if Lewis had been aware of the correct technical requirements.

What is true about Lewis's metre applies also to the line chosen by Kimon Friar in his translation of Nikos Kazantzakis's Greek epic, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

A mild breeze blew on ringlets of a yellow brow,

somewhere amid an olive tree a nightbird sighed,

soft seawaves far away in the smooth shingles murmured

and happy night in her first sleep mumbled in dream.

Telemachus then turned to his harsh-speaking lord:

¹ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nicos Kazantzakis, translated into English Verse, Synopsis and Notes by Kimon Friar (Simon & Schuster, New York. 1958), p, xxvii.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid., p. 6, lines 153-61.

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"Father, your eyes are brimmed with blood, your fists are smoking!"

The cruel man-slayer grabbed his son and roared with laughter:

two crows on two black branches shook with fright, and fled,

and in the court an old oak swayed with all its stars.

Immediately we can pick out four lines as Homeric in movement, the second and third of them completely so, the first and fourth just wanting one foot at the end, and all of them are unconsciously Aurobindonian quantitative hexameters with their many kinds of legitimised variations:

soft sea | waves far a | way on the | smooth shingles | murmured...

"Father, your | eyes are | brimmed with | blood, your | fists are | smoking |"

The cruel | man-slayer | grabbed his | son and | roared with | laughter:

two crows on | two black | branches | shook with | fright, and fled...

The one writer who in the past has come nearest to the hexameter of Homer or Virgil in English is not Friar or Lewis or Lattimore: it is H.B. Cotterill In 1911 he published his translation of the Odyssey.¹ Rejecting academic attempts to

¹ Homer's Odyssey, A Line-for-line Translation in the Metre of the Original by H. B. Cotterill (London, George G. Harrap & Co.), 1911.

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construct the Homeric or Virgilian line on the principles of Classical quantity without attention to the natural English stress, he accepts the accentual hexameter as practised by Sou-they, Lockhart, Longfellow, Kingsley and Clough but adds¹ : "most unfortunately, many of the advocates of the 'accentual* against the 'quantitative hexameter'..have made a fatal mistake in maintaining that quantity (length, weight) does not exist at all in English, or, if it does, that it is a quantité négligeable. Anyhow, my ear has become ever more and more impatient of the ordinary English hexameter with its disregard of quantity—the beauty and vigour of a line seeming to me to depend mainly on the coincidence of quantity and accent, and on the use of true spondees and dactyls." These are wise words but not sufficiently so, for it would be hardly possible to maintain for any desirable length a coincidence of quantity and accent. Cotterill himself strikes a compromise when he comes to tabulate his rules. For, he² wants his accents to fall either on long syllables or on those "weighted with meaning when somewhat short in pronunciation" and his "slacks' or unaccented syllables to be either short or "light, unemphatic. and never (even if short in pronunciation) any monosyllable or dissyllable that makes one pause to think such as a verb, a noun, or an adjective". Face to face with these rules, we shall have to make-do often enough not only with intrinsic shorts in place of the old longs but also with intrinsic longs in place of the old shorts. The principles of quantity grow rather a hotchpotch in this scheme: consistency and order could come only if the accented shorts and the unaccented longs are put on a parity with the accented longs as metrical elements and as foot-builders. Of course, how and when this or that element is to be employed would rest with the inspired ear. But to leave any of these three out would be

¹ Ibid., pp. xii-iv. ² Ibid., pp. xv-vi.

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to falsify the truth of the hexametrical spirit. And then the insistence on mere dactyls and spondees would scarcely continue. Other feet would automatically be formed. And, all in all, we would arrive at the Aurobindonian vision. Partly because of an incomplete and arbitrary scheme and partly because the afflatus was not as intense as Sri Aurobindo's, Cotterill's counterpart¹ to the opening of the Odyssey we have culled from Sri Aurobindo, though a good composition on the whole by unconsciously approximating in its form to some of the technical insights of Sri Aurobindo, misses yet the genuine Homeric "how" of expression, except for line 4:

Sing, O Muse, of the man so weary and wise, who in far lands

Wandered whenas he had wasted the sacred town of the Trojans.

Many a people he saw and beheld their cities and customs,

Many a woe he endured in his heart as he tossed on the ocean,

Striving to win him his life and to bring home safely his comrades.

Ah but he rescued them not, those comrades, much as he wished it.

Ruined by their own act of infatuate madness they perished,

Fools that they were—who the cows of the sun-god, lord Hyperion,

Slaughtered and ate; and he took from the men their day of returning.

Sing—whence-ever the lay—sing, Zeus-born goddess for us too!

It would seem that today the most promising voice is of an American disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Jesse Roarke. He has a translation of the entire Iliad waiting for an imaginative publisher.

¹ Ibid., p. 1

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Some passages have seen the light in the pages of Mother India.¹ Quite a few of their quantitative units may take some time to go home to the ear accustomed to Sri Aurobindo's handling of the form; but that would be due mostly to Roarke's more frequent use of the trochee (commonly substituting the Greek spondee) as compared to the predominance of the dactyl or other trisyllabic feet in Sri Aurobindo. It is a question whether this divergence is not somewhat of a hindrance at times to the largeness of utterance we expect from the Homeric movement; but the inspiration in the published passage is sufficiently strong to leap over the hitches of technique if any— and scholars still differ as to the technical importance of the spondee in Homer, though the greater occurrence of the dactyl on the whole is rarely in doubt. Anyway, future poets are free to follow their own instinct and ear in the wake of Sri Aurobindo's pioneering achievement on a grand scale, which sets the broad norm. We may quote one telling effect as a token from Roarke's rendering of the famous account of Priam's visit to Achilles to recover the body of Hector:

Then the voice of Priam spoke and was raised in entreaty:

"O Achilles, like to the gods, remember your father,

Whose years are even as mine, on the grievous tread of his old age;

Haply now the dwellers about are treating him badly,

Harming him, now there is none for his shield from ruin and evil.

Yet whenever he hears of you and knows you are living.

Then he has joy in his breast and day by day he is hopeful,

Waiting to see his own dear son returned from the Troad;

Yet myself am bereft entirely, I who begot sons

Best in Troy's broad land, and see not one who is left me...

Have due thought of the gods, Achilles, and show me compassion,

Your father bear in your heart; for I am more to be pitied

Even than he, who am suffering what none has suffered on earth—to

Lift my hand to the face of the man who has slaughtered my own son."

¹ October, 1969, pp. 628-30.

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