Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 4

Translations

I  

During the Baroda period, Sri Aurobindo engaged in a great deal of literary activity in prose and in verse, in journalistic as also serious creative writing. Journalism embalmed years after its publication in the form of a book could be utterly unreadable. But Sri Aurobindo's contemporary political comment like 'New Lamps for Old' and first forays in literary criticism like the series of articles on Bankim still leap to life as one reads them, and both have been republished in book form.¹ Some other political writings of the last years of the Baroda period - notably the 'Bhavani Mandir' scheme which the Government of the time thought was a veritable piece of political dynamite - will be more appropriately discussed in a later Section of the book. In this and the three subsequent chapters, we shall consider Sri Aurobindo's English poetical compositions of the Baroda period - translations, narrative poetry, dramatic poetry, and other poetry both sacred and secular.

The return to India, the renewed contact (after the suspension of fourteen years) with Indian people and Indian culture, seems to have released in Sri Aurobindo a hidden spring of literary activity, and the flow of verse - whether as translation or as original creation - seems to have continued uninterrupted year after year; and even his political or yogic preoccupations during the latter part of his Baroda stay did not affect this activity, and sometimes indeed actually gave it a fresh momentum and force of utterance. We saw in the last chapter how one result of the practice of pranayama was a greatly increased speed of poetic composition, often some 200 lines in less than an hour. So too we shall find him, in the thick of the political period, essaying powerful verse narratives like Baji Prabhou and Vidula or adventuring into the realm of poetic drama in Perseus the Deliverer.

Although Sri Aurobindo's first acquaintance and his growing intimacy with Bengali and Sanskrit literature opened a rich vein of poetic interest and inspiration resulting in a burst of activity comprising translations, adaptations, imitations, transmutations and also original creations, yet only very little of this immense body of work was actually published during the Baroda period - a few pieces in Songs to Myrtilla (1895), some of Bhartrihari's 'The Century of Life' in the Baroda College Miscellany and the early narrative poem Urvasie (1896). During Sri Aurobindo's editorship of the Bande Mataram and later of the Karmayogin, some of his poems including Baji Prabhou and translations like Vidula (from the Mahabharata) and his original play Perseus the Deliverer appeared in those papers or in the Modern Review. Songs of the Sea, Sri Aurobindo's translation of C.. R. Das's Sagar-Sangit, was published only in 1923 and hence does not strictly belong to the Baroda period, but it is conveniently discussed in this chapter along  

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with the other translations from Bengali and Sanskrit. Another early narrative poem, love and Death, was first published only in 1921, and some of the early lyrics were included in Ahana and Other Poems and issued In 1915.

Apart from the above, Sri Aurobindo translated a large quantity of Bengali and Sanskrit poetry and also wrote numerous original poems and plays, but left most of it as drafts (often two or more drafts of the same work, or of particular passages or stanzas), some in a complete and some in a fragmentary form. The Hero and the Nymph, Sri Aurobindo's blank verse translation of Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie, for example, was begun in Baroda but not published till 1911. Many of Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts were seized during the Alipur trial (1908-9). These manuscripts were recovered after his passing, but others - especially his translation of the Meghaduta in terza rima - are apparently lost for ever. Those that were recovered (like the manuscript of the play, The Viziers of Bassora) lay forgotten in a trunk consigned to the limbo of the record room of a Court, and were spotted out, decades later, when it was about to be disposed of as waste paper to the Government contractor. Much of this unpublished material going back even to the early years of the Baroda period has been sorted out, deciphered, edited and given to the world posthumously, and our gratitude is not a little due to the scholarly editors who have brought so much devotion and critical ingenuity and discrimination to their task. The corpus of this literature belonging to the Baroda period, even though not all of it may have yet achieved publication, is still of formidable bulk. We can here no more than glance at it, now from this side now from that, and try to form some impression of its richness and variety. In this chapter, however, we shall confine ourselves to the translations: from old Greek poetry, from mediaeval and modem Bengali poetry, from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, from Bhartrihari, and lastly from Kalidasa.²

In the matter of translations, Sri Aurobindo seems to have held the not unreasonable, if perhaps unorthodox, view that mere literalness or word for word equation was not the ideal to be aimed at, and in fact he once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy: "A translator is not necessarily bound to the exact word and letter of the original he chooses; he can make his own poem out of it, if he likes, and that is  what is very often done."³ But it should be equally clear that if 'literalness' should not mean dullness, flatness or deadness ("turning life into death and poetic power into poverty and flatness"), equally 'freedom' should not mean a sheerly tangential escape into regions altogether new. A literary (literary not literal) translation is no students' crib, but neither should it involve a Bottom-like transmogrification! Good translations like Dryden's Virgil and Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam are equally poems by virtue of their finish and their essential fidelity to their originals.* Sri Aurobindo's letters contain other perceptive remarks too, as for example:

There are two ways of rendering a poem from one language into another -

* Cf. George Sampson: "Dryden's Virgil is literally Dryden's Virgil... Its readers were already familiar with Virgil's Virgil, and wanted to know how a great English poet would treat that familiar story."

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one is to keep strictly to the manner and turn of the original, the other to take its spirit, sense and imagery and reproduce them freely so as to suit the new language....

The proper rule about literalness in translation... is that one should keep as close as possible to the original provided the result does not read like a translation but like an original poem in Bengali, and, as far as possible, as if it were the original poem originally written in Bengali....

I do not think it is the ideas that make the distinction between European and Indian tongues - it is the turn of the language.... Naturally, one should not go too far away from the original and say something quite different in substance but, subject to this limitation, any necessary freedom is quite admissible.⁴

There are two ways - neither way is better - both ways have their dangers and attractions - and the translator's own sense of measure (or matra) should guide him. Poetry is often turned to prose in translation; that was how Lang translated Homer into English. Likewise, can prose in one language be turned into verse in another? Yes, says Sri Aurobindo, but only in very special cases:

I think it is quite legitimate to translate poetic prose into poetry; I have done it myself when I translated The Hero and the Nymph on the ground that the beauty of Kalidasa's prose is best rendered by poetry in English, or at least that I found myself best able to render it in that way.⁵

But just as it is next to impossible to put poetry into prose in the same language (if it could be done, why poetry at all in the first instance?), it is even more an exercise in despair to try to render poetry into verse or prose in another language. Ideas can be transplanted from language to language (even this is not always easy), but poetry is the idea touched with the magic of phrase and incantatory music. There are no exact equivalents to heavily emotion-charged or myth-laden words, and hence absolute accuracy must be out of question when translating even from one contemporary language into another. And when it is a question of turning classical Greek or Latin or Sanskrit into modem English, the difficulties are bound to be greater still. Words like men have histories of their own; and the climate of an age conditions the nuances of meaning hovering round particular words or verbal concepts. This may call for a romantic or poetic approach to the problem, for not otherwise will the translator be able to wrest the intended old meaning and present it in a new guise.

II

In his Cambridge days and immediately afterwards, Sri Aurobindo often experimented in literary translation and turned passages or pieces from Latin or Greek into English. Hecuba from the Greek was liked by Laurence Binyon, who thought that it revealed a poetic talent that deserved to be cultivated. A Rose of Women  

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from Meleager was included in Songs to Myrtilla [Now in Translations (Volume 8 of the Centenary Edition)]:

Now lilies blow upon the windy height,

Now flowers the pansy kissed by tender rain,

Narcissus builds his house of self-delight

And Love's own fairest flower blooms again;

Vainly your gems, O meadows, you recall;

One simple girl breathes sweeter than you all.⁶

Sethna places alongside of this the corresponding version by F. L. Lucas to facilitate comparison:

Now the white violet's blooming, and that lover of the showers,

Narcissus, and the lilies go climbing up the hill,

And now delight of lovers, spring-flower among the flowers,

Sweet Rose of Persuasion, blossoms my Zenophil.

Ah, meadows, vain your laughter, in vain your shining hair:

Than all your fragrant garlands the lass I love's more fair.⁷

There is some charm no doubt in Lucas' elaboration (he needs one-third as many words more than Sri Aurobindo does), but simply as an English poem, Sri Aurobindo's seems to be more direct, more compact and more elegantly effective. A Doubt is from one of Sri Aurobindo's posthumous collections:

Many boons the new years make us

But the old world's gifts were three,

Dove of Cypris, wine of Bacchus.

Pan's sweet pipe in Sicily.

Love, wine, song, the core of living

Sweetest, oldest, musicalest.

If at end of forward striving

These, Life's first, proved also best?⁸

Far more ambitious is the translation of over 50 lines from Book I of the Odyssey. This was probably done several years later, when Sri Aurobindo was experimenting with quantitative metres, especially the Hexameter; and perhaps it should be studied along with the more ambitious Ahana and Ilion, which reveal a surer instinct and more expert touch in the handling of this exceptionally difficult metre. While a discussion of Sri Aurobindo's way with the Hexameter (a run of five dactyls clinched by a spondee or trochee) may thus be postponed to a later chapter, it will not be inappropriate here to quote the memorable opening lines:

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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.⁹

That surely is not far from the vibrant authentic voice of Homer, and to have brought about this effect is not an insignificant achievement.

III

The Homeric enchantment was, of course, not to be easily or ever to be shaken off; but once - after his return to India - Sri Aurobindo had learned to lave in Bengali and Sanskrit poetry, he was also seized with the desire to translate some of it, whether lyric, didactic, narrative or dramatic, into English verse.* The mediaeval lyrics of Vidyapati, Chandidas and others were an immediate irresistible temptation. In this rich vein of poetry, the divine and human aspects are so tantalisingly jumbled together that, at one and the same time, a lyric may be read both as sensuous erotic poetry and as the true mystical sublime of the poetry of devotion. The bhakti movement in Bengal was doubtless a part of a nation-wide movement, yet it had its distinctive local characteristics as well. Many years later, Sri Aurobindo brilliantly defined as follows the unique quality of this poetry:

The desire of the soul for God is there [in Bengali Vaishnava poetry] thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his magical flute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one overpowering passion and in the cadence of its phases passing through first desire to the bliss of union, the pangs of separation, the eternal longing and reunion, the līlā of the love of the human spirit for God.... This accomplished lyrical form springs at once to perfect birth from the genius of... Vidyapati, a consummate artist of word and line, and the inspired singer Chandidas in whose name stand some of the sweetest and most poignant and exquisite love-lyrics in any tongue.¹⁰

Two of Sri Aurobindo's renderings from Chandidas are included in Songs to Myrtilla and one more in a later collection. These three, along with selections from Nidhu Babu, Horu Thakur and Jnanadas (in all 37 pieces) came out in 1956, with the Bengali text facing the English version. Likewise forty-one of Vidyapati's songs

* In his earlier drafts and publications of the Baroda period, Sri Aurobindo spelt Indian proper names in their Bengali way of pronunciation: Yudhishthere, Arjoon, Cowshalya, Dussaruth, Himaloy, Menoca, etc., but I have usually given the current spelling so as not to cause undue puzzlement to the readers.  

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also came out in the same year. It is clear, however, that many of these renderings are "amplified transmutations" rather than close translations, and it was probably with these particularly in mind that Sri Aurobindo once confessed with his usual disarming good humour:

I admit that I have not practised what I preached, - whenever I translated I was careless of the hurt feelings of the original text and transmogrified it without mercy into whatever my fancy chose. But that is a high and mighty criminality which one ought not to imitate. Latterly I have tried to be more moral in my ways, I don't know with what success.¹¹

The best thing therefore would be to look upon these renderings from old Bengali poetry as merely flowing from the inspiration of the originals, though not austerely controlled by them. The renderings are the effusion of an exuberant youthful sensibility that for the first time felt the power and fascination of a rich native poetic tradition. The primary inspiration may have been Chandidas or Vidyapati, but what matters to us is that the lyrics have the authentic swing and taste of poetry:

O heart, my heart, merry thy sweet youth ran

In fields where no love was; thy breath

Is anguish, since his cruel reign began.

What other cure but death?¹²

It is Love's eternal faltering-unfaltering language; it is as old as, or older than, the hills and the sea and the sky; but it is not less poetic for being so primordial. What has poetry to do with terribly "new" things like the electric dynamo, the four-track recorder or the latest vacuum cleaner? Man, God and Nature are alone the primal stuff of poetry, and that is why we cannot help immediately responding to a stanza like:

Therefore to this sweet sanctuary I brought

My chilled and shuddering thought.

Ah, suffer, sweet,

To thy most faultless feet

That I should cling unchid; ah, spurn me not!¹³

In yet another poem. Karma, a pretty conceit is quickened with emotion; since Krishna will not come to Radha, she will now leap into the ocean and die -

Die and be born to life again

As Nanda's son, the joy of Braja's girls,

And I will make thee Radha then...

Then I will love thee and then leave...

Then shalt thou know the bitterness of love.¹⁴

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Vidyapati is often uninhibitedly sensuous, scattering references to the wealth of woman's physical charms: her breasts are first plums of light, then golden oranges, then pomegranate seed-cities, and finally they are fruits-of-opulence twin. In poem after poem, woman's beauty - the theme and haven of love - is described with a conscious display of elaboration that silences comment:

Thy tendrilled down's a snake, to drink cool winds

That from thy harbouring navel stirred,

But by the fancied bill of emperor bird

Cowed to thy breast's hill-cavern winds.¹⁵

Such poetry may be sensuous? but it is not really sensual, this sense of love-play between young cowherdesses and the dark-hued boyish Krishna is more a pastoral - or even proletarian - version of divine love than an exercise in eroticism, .and although the imagery is often bold, often audacious, often even outlandish, there is seldom any suggestion of mere sexuality. What can be purer, yet more charged with romantic suggestion, than these verses:

In her limbs divine

Child and woman meet and twine,

Nor mark I yet whether older she

Of girlhood or younger of infancy.

Beautiful Krishna;, youth in her

Its childhood begins....¹⁶

Twice I looked and then

With a sweet and sudden pain

Maddened. Ah, what power is this

For a look can slay with bliss?

Even so leaps, O my dove,

Into the heart made for him. Love.¹⁷

Sri Aurobindo's versions may miss the music of the original, but the flavour remains (albeit diffused) and provides the background and the atmosphere for this drama of the Love Divine.

The selections from Nidhu Babu are (at least in translation) less sensuous than those from Vidyapati, and have less lithesome grace than Chandidas'. In their"" English form, they read almost like Elizabethan and Jacobean love lyrics:

Sweet, gaze not always on thine own face in the mirror,

Lest looking so 'on thine own wondrous beauty,

Thou lose the habit of thy queenly duty

And thy poor' subject quite forget.¹⁸

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Hast thou remembered me at last, my own

And therefore come after so many days?

When man has once drained love and elsewhere flown,

Does he return to the forgotten face?

Therefore I think by error thou hast come,

Or else a passing pity led thee home.¹⁹

And the following has something of Donne's audacity of thought and expression:

Ere I had taken half my will of joy,

Why hast thou. Night, with cruel swiftness ceased?

To slay a woman's heart with sad annoy,

O ruddy Dawn, thou openest in the east.

The whispering world begins in dawn's red shining,

Nor will Night stay one hour for lovers' pining.

Ere love is done, must Dawn our love discover?²⁰

Although more elaborate, it makes the same point as Donne's -

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

It is, of course, humourless to comment on songs that effortlessly sing themselves out, - songs whose sentiment is sugar and honey, - songs whose theme is Love.

In the pieces from Horu Thakur, again, while love human is the exquisitely embroidered theme, the underlying symbolic meaning shows itself even without the explicit prose comment prefixed to them. The Gopis are quite obviously the god-intoxicated who have left everything - abandoned all dharmas - to meet their Lord and Lover and God; and when they experience a sense of desolation - the dark night of the soul - they needs must cry in anguish:

But Shyama, dost thou recollect not,

That we have left all for thy sake?

Of other thought, of other love we recked not,

Labouring thy love to wake.

Thy love's the only thought our minds reject not.²¹

In Jnanadas, too, there is a deep philosophical base, but once again what irresistibly makes an assault on our emotions is the powerful rendering of the emotion of love, intelligible enough in human terms, yet also affiliated to a divine dimension. The soul separated from the Eternal: entangled in Nature: burdened with clothes

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(or clinging attachments): stranded on this bank and shoal of existence: tossed in the waves while crossing... the familiar images, the tell-tale situations, but the theme is love followed by the pangs of separation and the penance of devotion and the ecstasy of the reunion. At his simplest, Jnanadas too can be as overpowering as the other Vaishnava poets:

My body almost swooned away

And from my heart went fear and shame

And maiden pride; panting I lay;

He was around me like a flame.²²

Chandidas, Vidyapati, Nidhu Babu, Horu Thakur, Jnanadas - they are five notes out of which Sri Aurobindo makes, in his 'transcreations', one song, one orchestrated symphony on the theme of Love Divine in the more familiar images of universal human love.

IV

Between human and divine love, there are various other Powers that too command human affections and adorations: the country, for instance, the country as Motherland (or fatherland), and Nature whether in its benign or in its awesome aspects - dawn, moonlight, mountain-range, the starlit sky, the sea. It was in 1909 that Sri Aurobindo's translation of Bankim's song, Bande Mataram, appeared in Karmayogin; and years later, in 1941, his translation of Dwijendralal Roy's Mother India was published in the Modern Review. When Sri Aurobindo wrote his series of articles on Bankim in 1893-4, although he made a casual reference to Anandamath, there was no mention of the song itself which was a part of the novel. But the song leapt out of its obscurity and blazed into sudden prominence during the 'Partition of Bengal' explosive agitation, and has since been enshrined in the nation's heart as an inspired anthem. In Sri Aurobindo's own words,

The Mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had revealed herself.... A great nation which has had that vision can never again bend its neck in subjection to the yoke of a conqueror.²³

Although this anthem - this magical incantation, - is difficult to translate into verse in another language "owing to its unique union of sweetness, simple directness and high poetic force",²⁴ Sri Aurobindo's poetic rendering comes reasonably close to the original in its rhythmic power and spiralling suggestiveness:

Mother, I bow to thee!

Rich with thy hurrying streams,

Bright with thy orchard gleams,

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Cool with thy winds of delight,

Dark fields waving, Mother of might,

Mother free....

Thou art wisdom, thou art law,

Thou our heart, our soul, our breath,

Thou the love divine, the awe

In our hearts that conquers death.²⁵

The Mother is Durga, Lady and Queen, and she is Lakshmi the "lotus-throned", and the Muse "a hundred-toned"; she is full beautiful with "glorious smile divine"; to her we bow, her feet we devoutly kiss!

Dwijendralal Roy's song, if less well-known, is no less powerfully motivated by the religion of patriotism, and much of its beauty and force of articulation may be inferred from Sri Aurobindo's English version:

India, my India, where first human eyes awoke to heavenly light,

All Asia's holy place of pilgrimage, great Motherland of might!

World-mother, first giver to humankind of philosophy and sacred lore,

Knowledge thou gav'st to man. God-love, works, art, religion's open door....

Art thou not she, that India, where the Aryan Rishis chanted high

The Veda's deep and dateless hymns and are we not their progeny?

Armed with that great tradition we shall walk the earth with heads unbowed:

O Mother, those who bear that glorious past may well be brave and proud.

India, my India, who dare call thee a thing for pity's grace today?

Mother of wisdom, worship, works, nurse of the spirit's inward ray!²⁶

It was in India that Lord Krishna sang the Song of Songs; it was upon India's dust that Gauranga "danced and drank God-love's mysterious wine"; it was India that witnessed the deathless Sun of Buddha's compassion and heard the stern Advaitic gospel of the great Shankara. What if all that grandeur be now "dwarfed or turned to bitter loss and maim"? We have not forgotten yet "the ideal of those splendid days of gold"; and the "new world of our vision" shall surely rise indeed and give back to us our lost heritage!

Love of Nature, like love of Motherland, can also be elevated to breathless oration akin to religious devotion and consecration. Making a reference to C.R. Das's Sagar-Sangit and to his own verse translation in English, Songs of the Sea, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947:

The sea to the Indian imagination is a symbol of life, - one speaks of the ocean of the samsāra and Indian Yoga sees in its occult visions life in the age of a sea or different planes of being as so many oceans. Das's poem expresses his communing with this ocean of universal life and psychic intimacies 

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with the Cosmic Spirit behind it and these have a character of grave emotion and intense feeling, not of mere sentimentalism, but they come from a very Indian and even a very Bengali mentality and may seem in translation to a different mind a profuse display of fancy and sentiment... ²⁷

The very next year (1948), St. John Perse's Amers was published in French, in which the poet celebrated the sea and himself in the sea, even as Whitman had celebrated himself and the universe in himself. If we sought a parallel, then, Sagar-Sangit should be paired, not with Byron's apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold, but rather with Perse's Amers.28 The basic symbolism in the latter is the mating of land and sea, female and male, and the gradual swell rises to a crescendo in the long ninth section of the 'Strophe, which is a Persean Song of Songs. In a climactic passage, human history is crammed into the undulations of a wave and Existence is seen as both the flux of appearance and as the essence of being:

In you, moving, we move, and we pronounce you the unnameable Sea; mutable and movable in her moultings, immutable and immovable in her mass; diversity in the principle and purity of Being, truth in the lie and betrayal in the message; all presence and all absence, all patience and all refusal....

And you immense compassion for all things perishable. Sea for ever irrepudiable, and Sea at last inseparable! Scourge of honour, monster of love!

Sagar-Sangit, which preceded Amers by almost three decades, had the same sweep of comprehension and the same variety of rhythmical articulation. In his version, Songs of the Sea, Sri Aurobindo tried his best "to give his [Das's] beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage".29 Reasonably close to the original, the song-sequence in English has its own character and is suffused with a poetic iridescence of its own. Here are a few passages picked at random from the poem:

O thou unhoped-for elusive wonder of the skies,

Stand still one moment! I will lead thee and bind

With music to the chambers of my mind.

Behold how calm today this sea before me lies

And quivering with what tremulous heart of dreams

In the pale glimmer of the faint moonbeams.

If thou at last art come indeed, O mystery, stay

Woven by song into my heart-beats from this day.³⁰

Behold, the perfect-gloried dawn has come

Far-floating from eternity her home.

Her limbs are clad in silver light of dreams,

Her brilliant influence on the water streams,

And in that argent flood to one white theme

Are gathering all the hues and threads of dream.³¹

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I sit upon thy hither shore, O main,

My gaze is on thy face. Yet sleep, O sleep!

My heart is trembling with a soundless strain,

My soul is watching by thy slumber deep.³²

Thy huge rebuke shook all my nature, all

The narrow coasts of thought sank crumbling in.

Collapsed that play-room and that lamp was quenched.

I stood in Ocean's thunders washed and drenched.³³

This shore and that shore, - I am tired, they pall.

Where thou art shoreless, take me from it all...

Have I not sought thee on a million streams,

And wheresoever the voice of music dreams,

In wondrous lights and sealing shadows caught,

And every night and every day have sought?

Pilot eternal, friend unknown embraced,

O, take me to thy shoreless self at last.³⁴

Through extracts however numerous, through comments however perceptive, it would be impossible to convey an adequate enough idea of the cumulative effect that these extraordinary 'Songs of the Sea' produce on the responsive inward ear. The whole sequence should be viewed as a single indivisible but vast beam of light, it is to be heard as the cry of the jīva for final union with the hourly experienced, yet still unapprehended, immensity and mystery and sublimity of the sea and the Universe that is like the sea. It is not simply the Bay of Bengal or the Indian Ocean, it is these, and beyond them (but also comprehending them), it is something more elemental, more primordial, - the ultimate Existence itself! As the sea is to Ellidda in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, to C.R. Das and to Sri Aurobindo too, the sea is a symbol of romance, symbol of the siege and the constitutive resolution of contraries, a museum and power-house of infinite consciousness-force. The arts of echo and refrain, of assonance and dissonance, of variation in movement through the adroit placing of polysyllabic words ("quivering in thy murmurous power"; "myriad serpents of infinitude"; "beginningless infinity"; "solitude of shoreless sound") to give added weight and momentum to the verse, all these are mobilised, controlled and converted into an abiding expression of the bottomless depth and mystery as also the ineluctable and "ineffugable" lure and fascination of the sea. In a hundred and one different ways is the sea invoked - it is the "unhoped-for elusive wonder of the skies", it is the "Infinite Voice", it is the minstrel of infinity", it is the "shoreless main", it is the "great mad sea", it is the illimitable", it is the "mighty One", and it is the "king of mysteries"; the poet . thus approaches the sea as a friend, as a lover, as a loyal subject, as a devotee, as a shadow that must ever pursue the object, as a waif that would return to the bosom  

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of the mother; and the music with its subtle undulations of dissolving sweetness fuses at last poet and reader and subject into a closed universe of harmony and bliss. It will thus be not wide of the mark to describe Songs of the Sea as a lyric-sequence with a core of purposeful spirituality that places it almost - almost if not quite - in the category of mystical poetry.

V

From Sri Aurobindo's draft manuscripts, a volume entitled Vyasa and Valmiki was published posthumously in 1956.35 This volume contained a valuable inquiry into "The Problem of the Mahabharata", some very stimulating "Notes on the Mahabharata" and a luminous fragment on "The Genius of Valmiki"; besides all this body of prose, the volume included also translations of selections from the bala and Ayodhya Kandas of the Ramayana and from the Sabha and Udyoga Parvas of the Mahabharata - a total of about 2000 lines of blank verse. These renderings were evidently explorative and experimental, and belonged to the early Baroda period. Sri Aurobindo's first taste of our two great epics must have given him the same feeling of excitement and exhilaration that the reading of Chapman's Homer gave to young Keats:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken...

The mind racing swiftly, the heart expansive and in a flutter of thrilled delight, the sensibility growing new wings of understanding, Sri Aurobindo viewed Valmiki and Vyasa as twin Himalayan peaks of poetic achievement, he saw the differences too, and also the lineness and difference between these on the one hand and, on the other, the greatest epic poet of the West, Homer:

.. .these poems [the Ramayana and the Mahabharata] are quite different from primitive edda and saga and greater in breadth of view and substance and height of motive - I do not speak now of aesthetic quality and poetic perfection - than the Homeric poems....³⁶

Vyasa's knowledge of character is not So intimate, emotional and sympathetic as Valmiki's; it has more of a heroic inspiration, less of a divine sympathy. He has reached it not like Valmiki immediately through the heart and imagination, but deliberately through intellect and experience, a deep criticism and reading of men... ³⁷

The longer speeches in the Ramayana, those even which have most the appearance of set, argumentative oration, proceed straight from the heart, the thoughts, words, reasonings come welling up from the dominant emotion or

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conflicting feeling of the speaker; they palpitate and are alive with the vital force from which they have sprung.... Vyasa's have a powerful but austere force of intellectuality. In expressing character they firmly expose it rather than spring half-unconsciously from it... .³⁸

But there is one thing common between all supreme poets, whether of the West or of the East:

The Kavi or Vates, poet and seer, is not the manīsī, he is not the logical thinker... his knowledge is one not with his thought, but with his being; he has not arrived at it but has it in himself by virtue of his power to become one with all that is around him... he is what he sees; he is the hero thundering in the forefront of the battle, the mother weeping over her dead, the tree trembling violently in the storm, the flower warmly penetrated with the sunshine. And because he is these things, therefore he knows them; because he knows thus, spiritually and not rationally, he can write of them. He feels their delight and pain, he shares their virtue and sin, he enjoys their reward or bears their punishment. It is for this reason that poetry written out of the intellect is so inferior to poetry written out of the soul... .³⁹

It is necessary to form an idea, as we can from the above extracts (and the essays from which they are taken), of Sri Aurobindo's view of great epic poetry, for this gives us also a clue both to his choice of passages for translation and the quality of the translation itself.

It is not unlikely that Sri Aurobindo at one time entertained the possibility of translating practically the whole of at least the "original" Mahabharata (about 25,000 slokas) and the whole of the Ramayana, and the "Notes" and the experiments in translation were his first soundings in the oceanic vastness of the two epics. Other interests - politics, poetry, political journalism. Yoga, Yogashram - must have gradually pushed the original intention out of the field of actual execution. But the specimens that remain - even if they are no more than "drafts" - are certainly suggestive of the great unfulfilled possibilities. Let us now take a closer look at these experiments in translating our ancient epics at a time when Sri Aurobindo was still in his nonage.*

The choice of the Cantos is, in a sense, itself indicative of an artistic intention: in the Ramayana, first the description of Ayodhya, then three forays into the magnificently dramatic Ayodhya Kanda . It is the perfect tragedy, the coronation turning into exile. The "reversal of fortune", of course, is engineered by Manthara, Kaikeyi and Dasaratha (in that order). But Rama's fate impinges with particular force on two women, Kausalya and Sita - the mother and the wife. Sri Aurobindo therefore chooses passages from Sarga 20 and Sargas 26-30 for translation: Kausalya's tears are the background, while the issue between Rama and Sita is the

* On one of his visits to Baroda, Romesh Chandra Dutt is said to have remarked about Sri Aurobindo's translations from the epics: "Had I seen them before, I would never have published mine. It "now appears that my translations have been child's play beside yours." (Dinendra Kumar Roy, Arabinda Prasanga, pp. 38-9)  

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foreground drama. Only a few fragments chosen as if at random - An Aryan City: Dasaratha's Speech to the States-General: A Mother's Lament: The Wife - and, whether intended or not, there is here a whole drama packed with irony and catastrophe, poetry and pity, defiance and triumph.

Ayodhya the "Aryan City", - "a city without early peer"! And a city world-renowned, built by Manu of old:

Defiant

Ayodhya stood, armed, impregnable,

Inviolable in her virgin walls...

Mass upon serried mass the houses rose,

Seven-storied architectures metrical

Upon a level base, and made sublime.⁴⁰

Its King, aged Dasaratha, summons his States-General and asks whether he might share the burden of kingly cares with Rama his son; and with loud acclaim they agree. And now from the great city and its throne, Rama is to be doubly exiled: peripeteia, sudden and total. The shock is deeply felt by Kausalya, for this comes as the culminating shame and agony of her life:

Cruelly neglected, grievously oppressed

I have lived slighted in my husband's house

As though Kaikayie's serving-woman...

And now this mighty anguish without end!⁴¹

She is half-crushed by the accumulated wrongs of a life-time, and here is the final shattering blow! She would follow Rama to the woods, if she might...

Then comes the great encounter with Sita the Wife. It is a complete miniature drama in itself. Sita's high expectations - her sharp forebodings at the sight of Rama - Rama's strangely faltering and unconvincing speech:

But thou before King Bharath speak my name

Seldom; thou knowest great and wealthy men

Are jealous and endure not others' praise.

Speak low and humbly of me when thou speakest,

Observing all his moods...

Cross not Bharath

Even slightly in his will. He is thy king,

Monarch of thee and monarch of our house

And all this nation. 'Tis by modest awe

And soft obedience and high toilsome service

That princes are appeased, but being crossed

Most dangerous grow the wrathful hearts of kings.. ,⁴²  

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Was it really so bad as that? Or was Rama but prodding and testing Sita - prodding a wound with fiery coal? But Sita answers steadily:

What words are these,

Rama, from thee? What frail unworthy spirit

Converses with me uttering thoughts depraved,

Inglorious, full of ignominy...

Rama, this day thou journeyest, I will walk

Before thee, treading down the thorns and sharp

Grasses, smoothing with my torn feet thy way...

O Rama, Paradise and thou not there

No Paradise were to my mind.⁴³

The forest and its dangers do not frighten her. Even when Rama conjures up a vision of the horrors awaiting them in the forest - unfordable rivers, the python's haunt, thirsty tedious paths, reptiles of all shapes, fierce scorpions - she is unmoved:

O Rama, they are joys if borne for thee,

For thy dear love...

Ayodhya without Rama would be hell; aranya with Rama would be heaven. And in a raging climactic moment she hurls the terrible words at Rama:

Surely my father erred, great Mithila

Who rules and the Videhas, that he chose

Thee with his line to mate, Rama unworthy,

No man but woman in a male disguise.⁴⁴

So, after all, Rama has to capitulate, and hasn't he really expected this, really wanted this? He says simply:

Heaven's joys

Without thee now were beggarly and rude.

A distantly parallel situation is Portia (in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) claiming and winning equality with her husband, Brutus, who is forced in the end to answer her defiance with disarming acquiescence, and exclaim prayerfully; "O ye gods, render me worthy of this noble wife!"

With his sure instinct, Sri Aurobindo equated the anustup metre in Sanskrit with English blank verse, avoiding alike the Heroic couplet and the Locksley Hall metre used by R. C. Dutt in his version of the epics. Sri Aurobindo's blank verse with its easy transitions in pause, effortless modulations and well-structured verse  

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paragraphs proves a tractable enough medium for the expression of the whole range of emotion covered in the speeches of Kausalya, Rama and Sita. It is possible to enjoy these passages simply as English poetry, forgetting for the nonce that they are but translations from Valmiki. And, after all, this is the real test of a good translation.

VI

Sri Aurobindo may have loved the Ramayana more, but he was more inescapably gripped by the Mahabharata. His narrative poems, Urvasie and Love and Death, and the great symbolistic epic, Savitri, were all quarried in the first instance from the Mahabharata. He commented on the Gita (which has a central place in the epic) in a long series of luminous essays. He translated Vidula and published it in the Bande Mataram in 1909. And there are also the translations included in Vyasa and Valmiki. The sheer masculinity of Vyasa, his massive intellectual sweep, his rich experience of men and affairs, his superb grasp of the minutiae of politics and morals, his infallible insight into the dark caverns and his familiarity with the sunlit peaks of human nature, all made Vyasa an "unmixed Olympian". With his own wide-ranging interests, it was not surprising that Sri Aurobindo felt more often attracted by Vyasa - he was more often engaged by Vyasa - than even by Valmiki.

These renderings from the Mahabharata were, however, clearly of an earlier date than those from the Ramayana. Sri Aurobindo tries here Heroic (rhymed) verse, which considerably shackles his freedom and makes him coin words like "famousest" (to rhyme with "best"); and there are unpleasant inversions like "Deeds unattempted virtue maimed evince" or "Nor offering hospitable take we can". In his selective approach, Sri Aurobindo's choice has fallen on the construction of the great Hall and the adroit moves towards the Rajasuya Sacrifice, which have less emotional but more political or intellectual content than the passages translated from the Ramayana. The Mahabharata renderings thus suffer in comparison with those from the Ramayana', and, besides, we have here but a first essay in translation, and merely a first draft of that early exercise. We cannot look for perfection here, nor even high achievement.

Even admitting all this, there are not wanting lines - even passages - that bespeak not only future promise but a measure of present achievement as well. This description of Dharma Rajya, for example:

The thriving provinces were void of fear;

Strife was forgotten and each liberal year

The rains were measured to desire; nor man

The natural limit of his course outran:

Usury, tillage, rearing, merchandise  

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Throve with good government and sacrifice

Prospered; rack-renting was not nor unjust

Extortion; from the land pestilence was thrust,

And mad calamity of fire unknown

Became while this just monarch had his own...

Even greedy, passionate, luxurious men

His just rule to the common welfare turned.⁴⁵

And here is Yudhisthira's speech to Krishna when seeking his counsel:

Some from affection lovingly suppress

Their friend's worst fault and some from selfishness,

Speaking what most will please. Others conceal

Their own good with the name of commonweal.

Such counsel in his need a monarch hath.

But thou art pure...

...and thou wilt tell

What shall be solely and supremely well.⁴⁴

The discussion between the brothers and Krishna regarding the desirability of the Rajasuya Sacrifice is very revealing on an intellectual and political level.* In the later conversation with Jarasandha, some lines at least stand out:

Is there a man in all the world whose mind

Like thine is violent, like thine is blind?...

For what is Indra's heaven, what Paradise?

heaven in noble deeds and virtue lies.⁴⁷

Why was Sri Aurobindo drawn particularly to these episodes in the main Mahabharata story? Wasn't it because they gave a clue to the working of the mind of Krishna, the real sutradhara behind the vast drama of the epic of Bharat?

A later edition of Vyasa and Valmiki (1964) included also a fragment from The Tale of Nala and two different versions of the Chitrangada story (one of which had appeared in the Karmayogin and later in the Annual of the Sri Aurobindo. Circle, 1949, Bombay), both from the Mahabharata. All these are in blank verse, which probably implies that they were written some time after the Sabha Parva fragments. From the beginning, Sri Aurobindo was attracted to the Nala and Savitri stories:

Here [i.e., in the Nala and Savitri stories] we have the very morning of Vyasa's

* "This conversation," says Rajaji, "has a curiously modem ring about it and shows that powerful men in ancient times used very much the same specious reasoning as now." (Mahabharata, 1970 Edition, p.77)  

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genius, when he was young and ardent, perhaps still under the immediate influence of Valmiki.... The Nala therefore has the delicate and unusual romantic grace of a young and severe classic who has permitted himself to go a-maying in the fields of romance. There is a remote charm of restraint in the midst of abandon, of vigilance in the play of fancy which is passing sweet

and strange.⁴⁸

The 150-line Nala fragment (itself made up of two separate passages) shows better metrical organisation and verbal artistry than the extracts from the Sabha Parva. Only one excerpt can be given here:

The birds were voiceless on the unruffled boughs,

The spotted lizard in a dull-eyed ease

Basked on his sentinel stone, a single kite

Circled above; white-headed over rust

Of brown and gold he stained the azure moon.

Solitary in the spaces of his mind

Among these sights and sounds King Nala paced

Oblivious of the joy of world and kind.⁴⁹

Of the remaining two fragments from the Mahabharata - both on the Chitrangada theme - Uloupie was probably the earlier, abandoned in favour of the late Chitrangada which, although completed, has come down to us only in this fragmentary form. Both Urvasie and Chitrangada exercised a strange fascination over Tagore as well as Sri Aurobindo. In the latter's rendering of the theme, Chitrangada seems to accept the inevitability of Arjuna parting from her sooner or later:

Thou art not ours

More than the wind that lingers for a while

To touch our hair, then passes to its home.⁵⁰

Tagore brought his own insights into his subtle delineation of Chitrangada, and Sri Aurobindo doubtless gave his own colouring to the portrait of this warrior - woman who became Arjuna's greatly prized lover and Queen. The tale, however, breaks off suddenly, leaving us with the sense of promises unfulfilled.

Vidula, also from the Mahabharata, is a maturer work than the fragments considered so far, and when it first appeared in the Bande Mataram it was admirably pointed to the occasion and carried the caption "The Mother to Her Son". The "mother" in the poem is Vidula, a widowed Queen; her son, Sunjoy, has been dispossessed of his patrimony by the King of Sindhu. Sunjoy, however, has grown apathetic, and will not lift his finger to regain the throne of his forefathers. He feels that, circumstanced as he is, any attempt on his part to oust the proud conqueror must prove futile; he therefore plays for safety - safety in dishonour. Vidula, on the contrary, is an "unwomanly woman" in the Shavian sense; she addresses

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spirited words to her son so unmanly, trying to rouse him to manliness and action. Death is preferable to slavery; death on the battlefield is to be preferred to eating one's heart out in the supposed security of one's, (Kafkaesque) burrow of abject retreat. Vidula, woman though she is, is for toil aid danger and tears and sweat; she will not countenance acquiescence in a visible and lacerating wrong; she will banish all softness and soapiness and sloth, and embrace the blood and iron of heroic warfare. Neither the fearful horrors of war nor the hopeless uncertainty of its ultimate outcome deters her from urging upon Sunjoy the imperative need to give instant battle to the enemy.

Vidula is thus a scream of passion - radiant, full-throated, fiercely inspiring - and an irresistible summons to action. Sri Aurobindo here wields the Locksley Hall metre with considerable dexterity and power and the mother's exhortation to the son acquires in the result the topicality and universality of a moving patriotic "order of the day":

"Son," she cried, "no son of mine to make thy mother's hearth rejoice!

Hark, thy foemen mock and triumph, yet to lye is still thy choice. 

Nor thy hero father got thee, nor I bore thee This my womb,

Random changeling from some world of petty souls and coward gloom!...

Out to battle, do thy man's work, falter not in high attempt.

So a man is quit before his God and saved from self-contempt...

Sunjoy, Sunjoy, waste not thou thy flame in 'smoke! Impetuous, dire,

Leap upon thy foes for havoc as a famished lion leaps

Storming through thy vanquished victors till thou fall on slaughtered heaps.

Shrink not from a noble action, stoop not to unworthy deed!

Vile are they who stoop, they gain not Heaven's doors, nor here succeed...

When thou winnest difficult victory from the; clutch of fearful strife

I shall know thou art my offspring and shall love my son indeed "⁵¹

Sri Aurobindo admits that the style of the original) Sanskrit is "terse, brief, packed and allusive, sometimes knotted into a pregnant obscurity by the drastic economy of word and phrase".⁵² But the "free poetic paraphrase" - and that is what Vidula is - does convey an adequate enough impression, of the original, and occasional lines like -

Gathering here an earthly glory, shining there like Indra's sun...

Lo! we toss in shoreless waters, be the haven to our sail!

Lo! we drown in monstrous billows, be our boat with kindly hail!⁵³  

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assume a steel blade's edge and shine. However, it is only when the poem is read aloud at a stretch that it fully brings out Sri Aurobindo's mastery of rhythm and language, the control over argument and emotion, and one can see how perfectly Vidula's tempestuous passion is matched by her truly torrential speech.

Vidula is no doubt but a fiery page from the Mahabharata; and yet, appearing as it did as The Mother to Her son in the Bande Mataram, and at a time when Bankim Chandra's celebrated mantra "Bande Mataram!" was setting human hearts ablaze all over the country, the poem could not help acquiring a tremendous contemporaneous political connotation, quite apart from its value as poetry. Wasn't the "Mother" both Vidula and Bharati - Bhavani Bharati? Wasn't the "son" both the slothful Sunjoy and the slumbering people of India? Any subject nation in the world might find the poem inspiring. And there are passages which, although they were indited by Vyasa two thousand or more years ago, seem to refer actually to the predicament in our own time:

Now this nation and this army and the statesmen of the land,

All are torn by different counsels and they part to either hand.⁵⁴

It may sound like the speech of an elder statesman of yesterday in Parliament or Congress, but it is an old old stale theme, old as the Mahabharata and perhaps older still. It has a perennial relevance though, and that is why it moves men's hearts even today, and moves more than trumpets or bugle-sounds.

VII

Some of Sri Aurobindo's English renderings from Bhartrihari seem to have originally appeared in the Baroda College Miscellany in the eighteen nineties.55 But the Niti Shataka as a whole - carrying the title The Century of Life - was published only in 1924. The renderings - "free" rather than literal - generally manage to reproduce the content as well as the temper of the originals. Sri Aurobindo has tried a variety of stanza-forms, and one can judge his feeling for words even by merely scrutinising some of the titles: "The Human Cobra", "Aut Caesar aut Nullus", "Altruism Oceanic", "The Immutable Courage", "The Script of Fate", "Flowers from a Hidden Root", "The Flame of the Soul", "The Rain-lark to the Cloud", "Mountain Moloy", "The Might of Works", etc. Not being narrative poetry, each piece stands on its own, has its own inner logic, and its own structural organisation. This is working in miniature, and Sri Aurobindo seems to have got into the spirit of the exercise and imposed on himself the needed discipline.* Only

* In translating Bhartrihari's epigrams which are "as concise and lapidary as the Greek," Sri Aurobindo nevertheless "indulged my tendency at the time which was predominantly romantic: the version presents faithfully enough the ideas of the Sanskrit poet but not the spirit and manner of his style." (Life - Literature - Yoga, p. 96. Also SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 254.)  

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a few quotations can be given here to convey an idea of both the distilled wisdom of Bhartrihari and of the grace and epigrammatic finish of Sri Aurobindo's English renderings. Here is the portrait of the "Man of Action":

Happiness is nothing, sorrow nothing. He

Recks not of these whom his clear thoughts impel

To action, whether little and miserably

He fare on roots or softly dine and well,

Whether bare ground receive his sleep or bed

With smoothest pillows ease his pensive head,

Whether in rags or heavenly robes he dwell.⁵⁶

Even more sharply phrased, and defiantly dialectical in its organisation, is the projection of "The Proud Soul's Choice":

But one God to worship, hermit Shiv or puissant Vishnu high;

But one friend to clasp, the first of men or proud Philosophy;

But one home to live in. Earth's imperial city or the wild;

But one wife to kiss, Earth's sweetest face or Nature, God's own child.

Either in your world the mightiest or my desert solitary.⁵⁷

In another piece, "A Little Knowledge", the intended contrast is conveyed by, a combination of the knife-edged clarity and cherry-blossom fragrance of a Japanese miniature:

When I was with a little knowledge cursed,

Like a mad elephant I stormed about

And thought myself all-knowing. But when deep-versed

Rich minds some portion of their wealth disbursed

My poverty to raise, then for a lout

And dunce I knew myself, and the insolence went

Out from me like a fever violent.⁵⁸

And - to quote one piece more - here is the description of graded wickedness culminating in the "Abomination" itself:

Rare are the hearts that for another's joy

Fling from them self and hope of their own bliss;

Himself unhurt for other's good to try

Man's impulse and his common nature is:

But they who for their poor and selfish aims

Hurt others, are but fiends with human names,

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Who hurt their brother-men, themselves unhelped,

What they are we know not, nor what horror whelped.⁵⁹

Epigrammatic and aphoristic. The Century of Life is reared upon experience and worldly wisdom and the received imperatives of Dharma; but the incandescent fury of poetic imagination but fitfully lights up these verses. Nevertheless the verses are crystal-pure and also crystal-clear, and one cannot withhold admiration from a literary craftsman who can turn out of his forge lines like:

Only man's soul looks out with luminous eyes

Upon the worlds inimitably wise.

The sweet fair girl-wife broken with bridal bliss...

Seven griefs are as seven daggers in my heart...

In the dim-glinting womb and luminous murk...

Thorns are her nature, but her face the rose.⁶⁰

The Century of Life belongs to the class of gnomic verse, subhashita, a literary form rather peculiar to Sanskrit, in which the appeal is usually to the head and not to the heart. But as Sri Aurobindo has rightly pointed out, "in the work of Bhartrihari it assumes the proportions of genius, because he writes not only with the thought but with emotion, with what might be called a moved intellectuality of the feeling and an intimate experience that gives great potency and sometimes poignancy to his utterance".61 Even in translation, as we have seen, there are flashes that penetrate deeper than the intellect and reveal more than the crystallisation of worldly wisdom.

VIII

It was inevitable that, once he had plunged into Sanskrit studies, Sri Aurobindo should feel drawn (sooner than later), as iron to magnet, to the poetic genius of Kalidasa. Sri Aurobindo seems to have made, in the early Baroda period, drafts of translations of Vikramorvasie, Meghaduta and the first canto of Kumara-sambhavam, - perhaps of Kalidasa's other works too.* While the renderings of Vikramorvasie as revised, saw publication in 1911 as The Hero and the Nymph,

* Recent research has shown that the translation of the first canto of Kumarasambhavam (SABCL, Vol. 8, p. 97) was done in Pondicherry around 1917. In Baroda Sri Aurobindo did write a set of "Skeleton Notes" on the fifth canto of Kalidasa's epic (SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 308).  

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the translation of the Meghaduta has not been recovered so far; the three early drafts of the translation of Kumarasambhavam, however, are how published,62 along with Sri Aurobindo's early essays on Kalidasa, on the problem of translating Kalidasa and on some of the characters in Kalidasa. From all this, one thing is clear: Sri Aurobindo set about the task of translation always with a sense of commitment, and only after clarifying to his own satisfaction the principles that should govern each particular adventure in translation. Also, he continually experimented: for example, we have seen how he tried the Heroic couplet, the Locksley Hall metre and, finally, blank verse for rendering the anushtup metre of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. He used a variety of metrical and stanza patterns for The Century of Life. And he used a five-line stanza in his first draft of The Birth of the War-God, but switched over to blank verse in the second and third drafts of the same poem. Sri Aurobindo was thus not averse to experimenting and learning and experimenting again.

On the question of translating Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo makes certain points which are indeed capable of a wider application to the translation of Indian poetry generally to any modem European language. The problem is difficult, yet it must be solved; and the difficulty would be proportionate to the greater perfection of the poem to be translated. Describing the Meghaduta, Sri Aurobindo resorts to superlatives:

...the most marvellously perfect descriptive and elegiac poem in the world's literature. Every possible beauty of phrase, every possible beauty of sound, every grace of literary association, every source of imaginative and sensuous beauty has been woven together into a harmony which is without rival and without fault; for amidst all its wealth of colour, delicacy and sweetness, there is not a word too much or too little, no false note, no excessive or defective touch; the colouring is just and subdued in its richness, the verse movement regular in its variety, the diction simple in its suggestiveness, the emotion convincing and fervent behind a certain high restraint.. ⁶³

Such a masterpiece most certainly deserves to be introduced to English readers, "but 'its qualities of diction and verse cannot be rendered.... We must be content to lose something in order that we may not lose all". Again, how is the translator to rind an equivalent for the mandakranta' - "gently stepping" - metre? Sri Aurobindo writes, in justification of his choice of terza rima:

...I was only certain of one thing that neither blank verse nor the royal quatrain stanza would serve my purpose; the one has not the necessary basis of recurring harmonics; in the other the recurrence is too rigid, sharply defined and unvarying to represent the eternal swell and surge of Kalidasa's stanza. Fortunately, by an inspiration and without deliberate choice, Kalidasa's lines, 85 I began turning them, flowed into the form of triple rhyme and that necessarily suggested the terza rima.⁶⁴

Aside from the merits of the essay itself, 'On translating Kalidasa' is valuable because he cites in the course of it two or three stanzas from his own rendering of  

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the Meghaduta, the otherwise lost Cloud-Messenger in terza rima, the metre of Dante's Divina Commedia. We have now perforce to be satisfied with these significant samples of the translator's art:

"Dark like the cloudy foot of highest God

When starting from the dwarf-shape world-immense

With Titan-quelling step through heaven he strode."

Of Tripour slain in lovely dances joined

And linked troops the Oreads of the hill

Are singing and inspired with rushing wind

Sweet is the noise of bamboos fluting shrill;

Thou thundering in the mountain-glens with cry

Of drums shouldst the sublime orchestra fill.⁶⁵

While giving a detailed account of the reasons for various minor deviations from the original, Sri Aurobindo nevertheless claims an "essential fidelity which underlies the apparent freedom of my translation". While this may be arguable, there is no doubt we have lost, in the loss of his manuscript, one of his finest efforts as a translator.

Sri Aurobindo's translation of the first canto of Kumarasambhava - The Birth of the War-God-is particularly interesting because we have three successive drafts - for some slokas, four drafts - to facilitate comparative study and mark the progress in the freedom of translation. Let us take a look at one sweep of thought and wave of sound in the four successive versions, two in stanza-form and two in blank verse:

Because the Soma plant for sacrifice

He rears and for his strength upbearing Earth

The Lord of creatures gave to this great birth

His sacrificial share and ministries

And empire over all the mountains to his worth.

Because he rears for sacrifice the plant

Of honeyed wine, his sacred share fulfilled,

And for his many strengths upbearing Earth

The Father of the peoples' very hands

Crowned him the monarch of a million hills.

He bears

The honey Soma plant upon his heights,

Of Godward symbols the exalted source.

He by the Master of sacrifice was crowned

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The ancient monarch of a million hills.

...moonlit he bears,

Of godward symbols the exalted source,

The mystic Soma-plant upon his heights.

He by the Father of sacrifice climbs crowned,

Headman and dynast of earth's soaring hills.⁶⁶

Is the word 'Soma', which has profound associations for us but which may not carry the same spiral of suggestion for the English reader, to be retained in translation or not? In the second draft it becomes "the plant of honeyed wine", but 'Soma' is restored in the third and fourth versions. "All the mountains" becomes "a million hills" in the second and third version, and ends up in the last as "earth's soaring hills". It is a continuing effort to fuse fidelity to the text with poetic viability in a foreign language, and when (for example) we reach "the mystic Soma-plant" we know that the right phrase has at last been found, for "Soma" is retained and the substitution of "mystic" for "honey" brings out the fact that this plant is like no other. Here is another passage in the two later versions only (by then Sri Aurobindo seems to have abandoned the stanza form):

Even as a painting grows beneath the hand

Of a great master, as the lotus opens.

Its petals to the flatteries of the sun,

So into perfect roundness grew her limbs

And opened up sweet colour, form and light.

Her forms into a perfect roundness grew

And opened up sweet colour, grace and light.

So might a painting grow beneath the hand

Of some great master, so a lotus opens

Its bosom to the splendour of the sun.⁶⁷

The second flows with greater natural ease than the first, and charms us by the beauty of its finish; and as we move from draft to draft we too have the feeling "Tat we are watching "a painting grow beneath the hand of some great master". This infinite patience, this readiness to revise and refine, to recast and remould, this constant self-examination as to the limits of freedom and the meaning of fidelity, this tireless search for equivalent idiom, image and metre, all bespeak the Hero as Translator, a Hercules pt one of his difficult tasks. Bringing the power of great Sanskrit poetry into English verse was like bringing the Super mind into the human physical, vital and mental; but it was an effort of transformation worth in attempting, and it was in that spirit that Sri Aurobindo seems to have adventured in the seemingly intractable tasks of translation.

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IX

Of Sri Aurobindo's translations, only one other major work remains to be considered - The Hero and the Nymph. In attempting to render Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie into English verse, Sri Aurobindo knew he was daring the impossible, yet he was not daunted. Romantic, fascinating, tantalisingly remote from everyday experience, Vikramorvasie was not easily to be coaxed into changing her robes. That Sri Aurobindo's translation was no cavalier exercise but the result of a deep study of the play could be seen from the essays on the characters - Pururavas, Urvasie, and the rest - that he wrote at the time and have since been recovered and published. Unless the translator could seize the characters in the play in an act of imaginative attention, his task of putting their speeches into the idiom of another language must prove very frustrating. But once the characters and the characters in action have been so seized, the rest of the problem might prove easy of solution.

The story is easily told. Pururavas, the vanquisher of the Titans, is smitten with love for Urvasie, a beautiful nymph (apsara); Pururavas is already married, and there are the usual complications; but there's a divinity that shapes our ends, and thus all is well at the end. One may call it the ne plus ultra of romance: we visit arbours and are ravished by the moonlight; we scale great mountain heights, we visit Saint Bharat's hermitage in heaven, we watch the adorations, the fertile tears, the queer antics, and the blissful-cum-agonied ecstasies of Pururavas and Urvasie. And The Hero and the Nymph does succeed to a large extent in capturing and communicating the fever and the flavour and the elusive fascination of the original to English readers.

Pururavas is a warrior and king, but in the play itself it is the lover and the poet that is in the foreground. "Surely no king before or after," says Sri Aurobindo, "not even Richard II, had such a royal gift of language as this grand-son of the Sun and Moon. It is peculiar to him in the play."68 It is predestined that such a Hero as he should fall for and win such a nonpareil apsara as Urvasie:

The Urvasie of the myth... is the spirit of imaginative beauty in the universe, the unattainable ideal for which the soul of man is eternally panting, the goddess adored of the nympholept in all lands and in all ages. There is but one who can attain her, the man whose mind has become one mass of poetry and idealism and has made life itself identical with poetry, whose glorious and starlike career has itself been a conscious epic and whose soul holds friendship and close converse with the Gods. This is Pururavas... .⁶⁹

But the Hero is recognisable man as well, and the apsara is recognisable woman, the "blessed feminine", blessed as well as beautiful; "if this is a nymph of heaven, one thinks, then heaven must be beautifully like the earth"!⁷⁰

In the play itself, what does not one come across - valour, peril, heroism, distraction, jealousy, love's ecstasy, the frenzy of separation, even pleasantry and This humour! And blank verse, as handled by Sri Aurobindo, is seen to be an elastic  

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enough instrument for the expression of all these vagaries and varieties of emotion  and passion. One may laugh at, or with, Manavaka the Brahmin jester and King's companion, whose witticisms and profoundest observation alike originate from his inveterate gluttony. He is of course somewhat disagreeably loud when he plays the clown:

Houp! Houp! I feel like a brahmin who has had an invitation to dinner; he thinks dinner, talks dinner, looks dinner, his very sneeze has the music of the dinner-bell in it.⁷¹

But elsewhere, Manavaka's humour is more delightfully capricious and has the added charm of being expressed in the nervous rhythms of everyday speech:

Yes, I too when I cannot get sweet venison

And hunger for it, often beguile my belly

With celebrating all its savoury joys....

Why, what is there in Heaven to pine for? There

You do not eat, you do not drink, only

Stare like so many fishes in a row

With wide unblinking eyes.⁷²

But the play's real glory centres round the exquisite love drama of which Pururavas and Urvasie are the protagonists. They find and lose, and lose and find, themselves over and over again, and these alternations determine the general rhythm of the play. Pururavas, coming upon Urvasie as she stands, "her eyes closed in terror, supported on the right arm of Chitralekha", thus gallantly addresses her:

O thou too lovely!

Recall thy soul. The enemies of Heaven

Can injure thee no more; that danger's over.

The Thunderer's puissance still pervades the worlds.

O then uplift these long and lustrous eyes.

Like sapphire lilies in a pool where dawn

Comes smiling.⁷³

How deftly is the transition achieved from the terrific energy of the Thunderer's Puissance to the "long lustrous eyes" of the apsara!

The same command over both the dynamics of blank verse and the magic of sound values in English is revealed in many another passage as well, where too e verse luxuriates into arabesque and gives us symphonies like these:

'Tis noon. The tired

And heated peacock sinks to chill delight

Of water in the tree-encircling channel,

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The bee divides a crimson bud and creeps

Into its womb; there merged and safe from fire,

He's lurking. The duck too leaves her blazing pool

And shelters in cold lilies on the bank,

And in yon summer-house weary of heat

The parrot from his cage for water cries.⁷⁴

How beautifully twilight sits and dreams

Upon these palace walls! The peacocks now

Sit on their perches, drowsed with sleep and night,

Like figures hewn in stone. And on the roof

The fluttering pigeons with their pallid wings

Mislead the eye, disguised as rings of smoke

That from the window-ways have floated out I

Into the evening.⁷⁵

The lily of the night

Needs not to guess it is the moon's cool touch,

She starts not to the sunbeam. 'Tis so with me.

No other woman could but she alone

Heal with her little hands all my sick pining.⁷⁶

Noon or twilight or night. Nature yields her charms to the poet, and following Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo paints them vividly and memorably with his English brush.

Later still, Pururavas strings together many pathetic fallacies and felicities in description into one long, nervous, polyphonic, polychromatic rhapsody. Once again, it is worth quoting Sri Aurobindo himself about Pururavas in a frenzy of frustration in love and poetising exuberance:

...he is not mad like Lear or Ophelia; it is rather a temporary exaltation than a perversion or aberration from his natural state.... The whole essential temperament of the man comes whirling out in a gyrating pomp of tropes, fancies, conceits, quick and changing emotions; everything in existence he gifts with his own mind, speech, feelings and thus moves through the pageantry of Nature draping it in the regal mantle of his imagination until the whole world exists only to be the scene and witness of his sorrow.⁷⁷

Exclamation, distraction, surprise, reminiscence, bitter regrets, hopes that seem hopeless, apostrophes, accusations, piercing shrieks, sedate ruminations, all are thrown seemingly helter-skelter into one prolonged splendour of phosphorescent poetry. Sri Aurobindo artfully manages the shifting rhythms, the raging emotions, the racing images - and one not merely feels and hears, one verily sees the whole drama unrolling before one's eyes. Pururavas hurries forward, hoping to reach the hands of Urvasie; he is mistaken -

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Me miserable! This was

No anklets' cry embraceable with hands,

But moan of swans who seeing the grey wet sky

Grow passionate for Himalay's distant tarns.

Well, be it so. But ere in far desire

They leap up from this pool, I well might learn

Tidings from them of Urvasie.⁷⁸

In Venkatanatha's Hamsa Sandesa too, Rama accosts a swan and sends (after the manner of the Yaksha in Meghaduta) a message through her to Sita from whom he is separated. These are not conceits merely or pathetic fallacies, for the poet creates out of them "nurslings of immortality". Pururavas thus addresses in turn the swan, the chakravak bird "all saffron and vermilion", the "lotus-wooing bee", the "rut-dripping elephant"; attracted to the last specially, Pururavas says:

More to thee I stand

Attracted, elephant, as like with like.

Sovereign of sovereigns is my title, thou

Art monarch of the kingly elephants,

And this wide freedom of thy fragrant rut

Interminable imitates my own

Vast liberality to suppliant men.

Regally; thou hast in all the herd this mate,

I among loveliest women Urvasie.

In all things art thou like me; only I pray,

O friend, that thou mayest never know the pang,

The loss.⁷⁹

He cannot see Urvasie still, the place is too dark; there are no streaks of lightning either, and the stupendous cloud itself "is widowed of the lightning through my sin". Even so, Pururavas will not lose hope; he will question the "huge pile of scaling crags"; he will fanatically clutch at the accents of the Echo - and he falls down at last in a swoon, screaming out to the crags the name of his beloved. And so we watch, as does Urvasie herself, the incredible vicissitudes of Pururavas' agony till, almost as exhausted as the hero-Lover is, we are relieved to know that e lovers are reunited indeed; and we can even catch a glimpse of the celestial "nymph as the delighted lover accosts her:

Thus stand awhile. O fairest,

Thy face, suffused with crimson from this gem

Above thee pouring wide its fire and splendour,

Has all the beauty of a lotus reddening

In early sunlight.⁸⁰

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At Sri Aurobindo's magic touch, Kalidasa's superb figures are rekindled into a flame of beauty and his immortal play has won a sure habitation in the realms of English poetry.*

*When an Indian critic charged Sri Aurobindo "with modem nineteenth-century romanticism and a false imitation of Elizabethan drama" in his rendering of Vikramorvasie as The Hero and the Nymph, he answered thus: "...but Kalidasa's play is romantic in its whole tone and he might almost be described-as an Elizabethan predating by a thousand years at least the Elizabethans; indeed most of the ancient Sanskrit dramas are of this kind, though the tragic note is missing, and the general spirit resembles that of Elizabethan romantic comedy. So I do not think I committed any fault in making the translation romantic and in trying to make it Elizabethan...." (Life - Literature - Yoga (1967), p. 96. Also SABCL,Vol.26,p.253.)  

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