Learning with the Mother

WORDS OF THE MOTHER

In March 1952, the Mother started to translate Her work, ‘Words of the Mother (fourth Series)’ into French. By then I had left the school but Mother wanted me to continue my study of French. So She started a translation class for six of us: Chum, Jhumur, Bubu, Gauri, Parul and myself. We used to go daily to the Mother together. The class was held outside Pavitra Da’s room, in the corridor. Mother would sit on a stool with the six of us around Her. She gave each of us a notebook for taking down dictations. She started with the translation of Words of the Mother—IVseries, which were short answers to questions of disciples in English and had appeared in the form of a booklet in the year 1952. She would first read the original sentence in English and then, while verbally translating it into French, would simultaneously also write the French version of the text on a rough pad. She would also revise the text and make corrections. She would then take our notebooks and correct each one of them.

While correcting the notebooks, She would count the total number of words and give marks according to the number of words correctly written. For example, if there were 50 words in a dictation and we made 2 mistakes, She would give 48 marks. This is how She graded our exercise.

A facsimile showing how Mother gave us marks

After correction, Mother would rewrite Her own translation in fair and give the rough copy to me for the evening Green Group class, dictation or recitation, which I would paste in my notebook. She used many of the passages of the 4th Series for recitations but nothing from the 3rd Series was used.

The translation class gradually expanded and seniors like Pavitra Da, Nirod Da, Mrityunjoya Da and Debu soon joined it. Since there were so many people, the Mother stopped correcting notebooks individually. But She continued correcting mine till She completed the translation of the book in January 1953. When She completed the fourth series of The Words of the Mother, She translated the third series, the original of which also was in English.

She would often explain the meaning of words and sometimes discuss the mistakes that we had made while taking down the dictation. She would also explain the grammatical errors we made. Sometimes She would go deeper into the significance of the passage. These things were not recorded. In one of Her classes, Mother mentioned that The Words of the Mother was compiled by Amal Kiran and shown to Her and since She liked the compilation, it was printed as a booklet. But now while translating with us in the class, She was taking the liberty of rewriting some of the passages.