Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Last year we brought to the notice of our readers Volume Seven of the Collected Works of Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta. We are happy to bring out now the eighth and concluding volume of the Series. Wonder fills our heart when we reflect on the prodigious creativity of the literary genius that N.K.G. is. His first piece of writing was published in 1910 when he was barely twenty years old. Since that time he has been enriching in a ceaseless stream, for a span of seven decades, both the English and the Bengali literatures. His amazingly prolific pen is still active with all its luminous vitality, shedding profound insights in all his writings. So, we may reasonably express the hope that, in not too distant a future, we may be able to bring out another volume supplementary to this eight-volume set of his Collected Works. In common with the preceding volume, the present volume too contains, in English version, some of Nolini Kanta's Vedic and Upanishadic writings originally composed in Bengali. These translations have been mostly made by Sanat K. Banerjee and Chinmoy Ghose. Apart from some famous Hymns and Prayers and a number of modern Bengali poems, we feel happy to have been able to include in this eighth volume some of Sri Aurobindo's Bengali essays and poems — all rendered into English by Nolini Kanta Gupta. The Appendix contains the original texts of the pieces thus translated. For various reasons, as we mentioned in the Publishers' Note to the previous volume, the Index for both the seventh and the eighth volumes appear at the end of the present volume. On the occasion of offering to our readers this last volume of N.K.G.'s Collected Works, we recall once again the words that we used while publishing in 1970 the first volume of the series: These works shed a new light on the pressing problems of man and his future. In the context of the present bewildering conditions of the world, they have a special relevance, and it is hoped that they will aid the modern man in his search of a new hope for a new life of unity and harmony.

24 April 1979