... described the English language as the gift of Goddess Saraswati to India. There was, of course, a time towards the end of our independence struggle and in the first decade after becoming free when English teachers were worried whether the pro-Hindi leaders would oust English ultimately because of political compulsions to promote swadeshi . There was genuine concern that the English language itself would... aplomb congratulating Amal Kiran for saying "the last word on the English language question; history has made English a world-language." In any case why should one bother about it? After all, language itself may lose its prime place as a communicator of ideas. Maybe telepathy would soon take its place! Still Raine is Raine! The English language she and Amal Kiran have been speaking of has no longer a future... languages of India? In a letter dated 28th February, 1936, Sri Aurobindo gave the reasons for his choice: I put forward four reasons why the experiment (by us of writing poetry in the English language) could be made: 1. The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially Indians. 2. We are entering an age when the ...
... Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's imagination but from the matrix of the language itself." A little later you allude to "Milton's welding and wielding of the very texture of language itself". I am afraid there is some mis-seeing of Milton's linguistic creativity. The English language was sufficiently developed... mark in attributing to AE the impression such as you have that Sri Aurobindo's spiritual poetry overstretched the English language. He was speaking of my poetry, not Sri Aurobindo's. There too, there is no question of his thinking like you. If he thought I was stretching the English language beyond its limits, he would not have written to Mr. Roy: "The verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine poetic... my bedside Ili on; Dick Batstone sent me the whole poem. It is of course a tour-deforce, reveals (even though I imagine an early work) a tremendous mental energy and of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter. But why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer? If I remember aright Valmiki's 'inspiration' came in the form of the metre in which he wrote ...
... Evolving India Can Indians write English poetry? The Indian Mind and the English Language W. B. YEATS is said to have " pooh-poohed" the idea that an Indian could write English poetry of a high order. It is indeed true that the subtle inwardness one feels towards one's mother-tongue is likely to be missing .when an Indian attempts to express... Bengali—or, for that matter, in English by Englishmen themselves—and you will have nearly the same impression of decorated barrenness. The trouble, therefore, lies not so much in our using the English language as in the difficulty of being a true poet in any language. Of course, it is more marked where a foreign tongue is concerned, yet it is not necessarily insuperable. And for Yeats in particular... tongue not indeed ungrammatically or unidiomatically or with imcompetent technique but with a certain Indian-ness of thought which fitted like a round peg the square hole, as it were, of the English language. In support of this subtle standpoint the name of Page 18 that famous interpreter of literature, Middleton Murry, was invoked. Murry had delivered himself on poems ...
... Indian Spirit and the World's Future The Significance of the English Language in India INDIA'S decision to remain a member of the Commonwealth in spite of being an independent sovereign Republic has given a new lease of life amongst us to the English language. Until recently English was apt to be regarded as the remnant of a foreign imposition, an inappropriate... have elected to share. This is all to the good - especially as America with whom we shall have more and more to deal is English-speaking. But we shall be underestimating the significance of the English language in India if we think that it is only a valuable means of promoting our political, economic and technological interests in the democratic world. English is, above all, an immense cultural asset... magnificent expression of our own soul. The first impulse, vis-à-vis this statement, will be to cry, "Absurd paradox!" and to follow up with the question: "Can India really take to the English language as an instrument of her Indianness and make her utterance in it anything more than an exotic curiosity?" The answer, surely, cannot be given with a facile pointing out of the great increase ...
... poet but at the same time an equally great literary critic too. And what is still more interesting to note in this connection is the fact that some of the celebrated contemporary poets of the English language who have not been able to appreciate in full the genre of poetry Sri Aurobindo has written, have been highly impressed by the eminent worth and quality of his literary criticism. One of them... very much to object to in this visioned voice? Sri Aurobindo: Can't accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of an eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me. The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter. Poetiy is permitted to be... the monosyllabic pronunciation of it deserves to be considered at least a legitimate variant when H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler -the name of Fowler is looked upon as a synonym for authority on the English language - give no other. I don't think I am mistaken in interpreting their intention. Take "realm", which they pronounce in brackets as 'relm'; now I see no difference as regards syllabification ...
... English speech? I catch a hint of mastery also in the felicitous boldness of "musicalest". 1 may add that even during his later life Sri Aurobindo kept on exercising his in-feeling of the English language and his insight into themes Classical. Perhaps you are unaware that side by side with the nearly twenty-four thousand lines he wrote of his blank-verse epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol he... Europe of the early twentieth century, it was a siren-song loud enough for one who from his earliest years had his mind steeped in the multifarious movement of modernism's self-expression in the English language. Plato was a voice I had heard from almost the beginning and his call to see the temporal as the changing image of the eternal was never quite forgotten, but it couldn't help becoming just a ... Page 16 So far you have indulged in generalities and off-hand judgments. At times you say that the Indian mind, all the more the Indian spiritual mind, is alien to the genius of the English language and yet you have told us in your new book on Yeats "of the great Hindu scriptures, of which, with his Swami, Sri Purohit, he made those fine translations of the ten principal Upanishads". How ...
... poets of the English language (those at least whom I know) have consistently pronounced and scanned them—as dissyllables. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare's line in the following way in order to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, " , strategems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe... monosyllabic pronunciation of it deserves to be considered at least a legitimate variant when H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler—the name of Fowler is looked upon as a synonym for authority on the English language— Page 629 give no other. I don't think I am mistaken in interpreting their intention. 1 Take "realm", which they pronounce in brackets as "rĕlm"; now I see no difference as regards... interrogatory elegiacs illustrating the predicament we should fall into if the Fowlers were allowed to spread their nets with impunity were very enjoyable. But I am afraid the tendency of the English language is towards con traction of vowel sounds, at least terminal ones; and perhaps the Oxford Dictionary has felt the need to monumentalise—clearly and authoritatively—the degree to which this tendency ...
... and Work of Sri Aurobindo The Significance of the English Language in India in India* India's decision to remain a member of the Commonwealth in spite of being an independent sovereign Republic has given a new lease of life amongst us to the English language. Until recently English was apt to be regarded as the remnant of a foreign imposition... elected to share. This is all to the good - especially as America with whom we shall have more and more to deal is English-speaking. But we shall be underestimating the significance of the English language in India if we think that it is only a valuable means of promoting our political, economic and technological interests in the democratic world. English is, above all, an immense cultural ... magnificent expression of our own soul. The first impulse, vis-à-vis this statement, will be to cry, "Absurd paradox!" and to follow up with the question: "Can India really take to the English language as an instrument other Indianness and make her utterance in it anything more than an exotic curiosity?" The answer, surely, cannot be given with a facile pointing out of the great increase ...
... and Usage I am in general agreement with your answer to Mendonҫa strictures on certain points in your style and your use of the English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are not unquestionably valid; they would be so only if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French;... boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the writer likes to make it. Stephen Phillips once said of it in a libertine image that the English language is like a woman who will not love you unless you take liberties with her. As for the changeableness, it is obvious in recent violences of alteration, now fixed and recognised, such as the pro... connections are familiar licences in English poetry—of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the l ...
... indeed what poet's are? - they reveal a true poetic spirit, and sometimes ascend to heights of great beauty and power. What will strike the English-speaking reader is the amazing mastery of the English language that the writer has attained." Richardson did not know of either Ilion or Savitri which were still unpublished, except for 380 lines of the former. He regarded Urvasie and Love and Death... Mallarme is economical in his use of words, as are all true poets. I could go on with many such examples, and it seems to me that the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language, and seems to be a blind-spot in your reading of him. Perhaps the best advice I ever received as a young poet was from Ezra Pound, on my one meeting with him - in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital... Englishman, a brilliant professor from Trinity College, Cambridge, John A. Chadwick, who got the name "Arjavananda" in the Ashram, There is no question of his suffering from any insensitiveness to the English language and its word-associations. Evidently he had a different idea from yours about translating poetry. Sri Aurobindo's comment on the rendering was: "This is a fine translation and it keeps, I think ...
... criticism and written not only short poems of striking merit both from the point of view of poetical substance and form — some of them ranking equal to the highest lyrical expression in the English language — but also a great epic poem of humanity. This is an age of what is called "modernist" poetry and even the possibility of an epic being written in modem times is strongly discounted. It... regional Indian languages were stagnant on account of the decline of national life, and all of them received a powerful impetus by the impact of European culture, especially as represented by the English language. Novel, drama, poetry, criticism, history, research along all the lines of literary effort have received an unprecedented inspiration as a means for the expression of national genius. A remarkable... is showing distinct signs of exhaustion and even some tendencies of decline, the resurgent spirit of India with all its rich spiritual heritage and possibilities is finding expression in the English language. The first sign of this remarkable achievement in poetic creation was given by the success of Tagore's Gitanjali. It showed that the expression of the Indian Spirit even in a remarkably Indian ...
... poetical criticism and written not only short poems of striking merit both from the point of view of poetical substance and form—some of them ranking equal to the highest lyrical expression in the English language—but also a great epic poem of humanity. This is an age of what is called "modernist" poetry and even the possibility of an epic being written in modern times is strongly discounted. It is... regional Indian languages were stagnant on account of the decline of national life, and all of them received a powerful impetus by the impact of European culture, especially as represented by the English language. Novel, drama, poetry, criticism, history, research along all the lines of literary effort have received an unprecedented inspiration as a means for the expression of national genius. A remarkable... signs of exhaustion and even some tendencies of decline, the resurgent spirit of India with all its rich spiritual heritage and possibilities Page 23 is finding expression in the English language. The first sign of this remarkable achievement in poetic creation was given by the success of Tagore's "Gitanjali". It showed that the expression of the Indian Spirit even in a remarkably Indian ...
... for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value—particularly as he was himself one of the greatest contemporary poets in the English language. Mr. Lal seems to have been exceptionally unfortunate in bis choice of Sri Aurobindo as a whipping-post. His own personal preference is for "realistic poetry reflecting ...the din and hubbub... the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lal's designation of Savitri Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism. If he is in addition an intellectual... Aurobindo, I might pick up something. But you cannot compel that from me, I am afraid it is not quite right to say that "a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism". Spiritual experience means ...
... one or more of their company. It is a common opinion that terza rima does not suit the English language and cannot therefore be naturalised, that it must always remain an exotic. This seems to me a fallacy. Any metre capable of accentual representation in harmony with the accentual law of the English language, can be naturalised in English. If it has not yet been done, we must attribute it to some... perfect rhymes only would be still more inartistic because it would not satisfy the natural human craving for liberty & variety. In this respect and in a hundred others the disabilities of the English language have been its blessings; the artistic labour & the opportunity for calling a subtler harmony out of discord have given its best poetical literature a force & power quite out of proportion to the... terms of English poetry. Yet to give up Page 251 the problem and content oneself with tumbling out the warm, throbbing Indian word to shiver & starve in the inclement atmosphere of the English language seems to me not only an act of literary inhumanity & a poor-spirited confession of failure, but a piece of laziness likely to defeat its own object. An English reader can gather no picture from ...
... his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one of the greatest contemporary poets in the English language. Mr. Lai seems to have been exceptionally unfortunate in his choice of Sri Aurobindo as a whipping-post. His own personal preference is for "realistic poetry reflecting... the din and... cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lai's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism. If he is in addition an ... Aurobindo, I might pick up something. But you cannot compel that from me. I am afraid it is not quite right to say that "a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism". Spiritual experience means ...
... don't think we need be more queasy than Englishmen themselves. Of course there were special circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don't find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental... doctrine that no one who is not a born and bred Englishman, especially no Oriental, should try to write or can really write English poetry because the traditions, sentiments, expressions of the English language—or of any language—are so different from others and so peculiar to itself that a foreigner cannot acquire them, is no new discovery; it is a statement that has been often made. But it fails at... in imminent peril of decadence and all its literatures are attacked by this malady, though it is only beginning and energy is still there which may Page 447 bring renewal. But the English language has still several strings to its bow and is not confined to an aged worn-out England. Moreover, there are two tendencies active in the modern mind, the over-intellectualised, over-sensualised ...
... poet-critics continued and led to the publication of two books — The English Language and the Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry. 2 Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language...If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the... did Sethna feel that the genuine spark was there! Though Parsi-Gujarati was the language spoken at his home, he couldn't be very articulate in that; for he had to rely entirely on the English language to communicate with the outside world. At home too, after every three or four words in Parsi-Gujarati, there was an English word. Hence English being practically his mother-tongue, it is... English was not by an Englishman ?" After many arguments and counter-arguments, Kathleen Raine withdraws from the discussion by saying: "Of course if India is determined to adopt the English language nobody can stop you. The blame lies with the English, who as a 'ruling race' for two hundred years impressed India with the power and prestige of our brief moment of material supremacy." ...
... things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental ones or intuitions occurring on the summits of consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of ordinary... seeing and experience. Truth first — a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and even if it did, the language will have to be made Page 290 adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that... Savitri should have appeared. Let us salute the Dawn." And one must congratulate him — the more because he is English — on his courage for having anticipated a hackneyed objection thus: "The English Language has been given to the world and its usages and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the islanders whose tongue it originally was. Those who would remain sole ...
... of experience. The English language is not accustomed to being used for this purpose. Except in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Earth, which is in prose, the language could not retain its intelligibility when Blake used it for a similar purpose in his mystical poems. Sri Aurobindo used the English language to convey his total vision of the modem world. The English language is used to reflecting... references to famous phrases and lines of poetry. These help him to gather together the revelatory hints and flashes and phrases in the poetic diction of great predecessors and to evolve in the English language, which does not have much of a tradition in this regard, a poetic diction that can build up the atmosphere and the imagery for interpreting the subtle soul-states that Sri Aurobindo wishes ...
... while meta-physical realities find a more congenial home in the English language. This is not to say that the English are born meta-physicians and that the French are in the same manner natural psychologists. This is merely to indicate a general trait or possible capacity of the respective languages. The English or the English language can hold no candle to the German race or the German language... not so much the higher) almost the hidden and occult movements of life. That is how mysticism-fa mystique - comes by a back door as it were into the French language. It seems natural for the English language to dwell on such heights of spiritual or metaphysical experience as A.E. gives us: A spirit of unfettered will Through light and darkness moving still Within the All to find its own... forming larger collectivities: there will be free associations of free nations, the Commonwealth as it has been termed. If India is to link herself specially to the English-speaking group, the English language will not cease to be an acquaintance but continue to be or develop into a very good friend. It may be argued that a foreign language, in order that it may be the medium of literary expression ...
... from India are two perfect examples of this kind. • Fourth, Sethna's contribution to the understanding of the intimate relationship between the English language and the Indian mind will have lasting value. His books The English Language and The Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry containing correspondence between him and Kathleen Raine are. a critic's delight, full of insights... and Ancient Indian History, Overhead Poetry, Christology, Comparative Mythology, the Study of Hellenic Literature and Culture, Indian systems of Yoga, International Affairs, the question of the English language and the Indian spirit, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Mystical, Spiritual and Scientific Thought, the Structure of Thought in Modern Physics and Biology... the list is endless! II ... or animosity, no name-calling, no attempt to discredit, caricature or ridicule the rival point of view or target opponents through the habit of "guilt by association". 2. The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986. Also see, Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen ...
... advance. "Nous progress:Imes." 66 If we busy ourselves with something like the study of the English language, as I have stated, it may indirectly help to keep the devil of Let us hope so. There is much need of keeping him off and if the English language can do it, glory be to the English language! March 1, 1935 You thrashed me for calling you grave and austere at the Darshan time... 1935 Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo March 1935 I am thinking of doing some studies in English language, not for any creative purpose, but for recreation. All right. With this aim in view, I want to take up your immortal philosophy—though my walnut of a brain can't do much with it—and if you will allow, have some discussions with ...
... perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. 5 October 1935 Brahma - Brahman - Brahmin Please favour me with the correct transliteration of the words ब्रह्म and ब्राह्मण in the English language. In the Essays on the Gita, they are spelt alike, viz. Brahman. What is the necessity of an "n" when transliterating ब्रह्म? In English, Brahma = the Creator, one of the Trinity. Brahman... February 1933 Dynamis Dynamis is a Greek word, not current, so far as I know, in English; but the verb dunamai , I can, am able, from which it derives, has given a number of words to the English language Page 156 including dynamise, dynamics, dynamic, dynamical, dyne (a unit of force), so that the word can be at once understood by all English readers. It means power, especially energetic... "Infinity imposes itself upon the appearances of the finite by its ineffugable self-existence." 3 [Note by a correspondent:] "Ineffugable is a new word, like dynamis, introduced into the English language by Sri Aurobindo. It means inescapable, inevitable, not to be avoided. A similar word was used by Blount in 1656 with slight change of form—ineffugible. Etymologically it is an adaptation of the ...
... powerfully independent political and economic being, has tended to be culturally a province of Europe, the south and centre by their dependence on the Spanish, and the north by its dependence on the English language. The life of the United States alone tends and strives to become a great and separate cultural existence, but its success is not commensurate with its power. Culturally, it is still to a great... be formed by another country with a different mentality and Page 516 must there find its centre and its law of development. In old times, America would have evolved and changed the English language according to its own needs until it became a new speech, as the mediaeval nations dealt with Latin, and arrived in this way at a characteristic instrument of self-expression; but under modern... nothing Page 517 has more successfully prevented her self-finding and development under modern conditions than the long overshadowing of the Indian tongues as cultural instruments by the English language. It is significant that the one sub-nation in India which from the first refused to undergo this yoke, devoted itself to the development of its language, made that for long its principal preoccupation ...
... English-educated, for the first time in India, expressed proto-nationalist sentiments in the English language. The famous grave in the Lower Circular Rd. cemetery not too far, is that of the first "modern" Bengali poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873). Madhusudan loved England and the English language as a young man. At the age of seventeen he wrote a small poem whose first line declares,... Hitopadesa (1786), Institutes of Hindu Law or the Ordinances of Manu (1794), and Gita Govinda (1799). He also wrote nine odes to Indian gods and goddesses, the first example of the use of the English language for purely Indian themes. Jones's enthusiasm for things Indian was not qualified or arrested by his Christianity. In one of his letters (to Earl Spencer) he wrote, "I am no Hindu; but I hold the ...
... atmosphere took hold of those who entered it and wrought a comprehensive change.’ 4 Aurobindo Ghose became an exceptional classical scholar and was soon also generally known as a master of the English language. An Englishman in later years travelling in India asked: ‘Do you know where Ghose is now, the classical scholar of Cambridge, who has come away to India to waste his future?’ 5 All his life... philosopher, which reads fluently even after seventy years and would still be accorded a place of honour in any philosophical publication. There is his essay on quantitative hexametres in the English language, his book, The Future Poetry, still undiscovered by the contemporary poets and theorists of poetry, and his writings on ‘overhead poetry’ — on the ‘overmental’ poetical sources. There is his... above all there is his epic, Savitri. All this would, by itself, suffice to justify the efforts of a lifetime — a lifetime of a scholar in the Western classical languages and of a poet in the English language. But Aurobindo Ghose did not become an ICS officer. The call to serve his mother country had grown more insistent, and he had developed an aversion of colonial officialdom however highly esteemed ...
... found great expression in his poetic writings, e.g., Perseus the Deliverer as a play and Ilion as an epic in Homeric quantitative hexameter based on the naturalness of temperament of the English language. Here it may be mentioned en passant that Sri Aurobindo wrote that drama, with a Grecian theme, during his most hectic political activities in Bengal. It was published in 1907 in the weekly... mystic, and poet, Sri Aurobindo, and his Ashram in Pondicherry, India. During a period of nearly fifty years before his passing in 1950, he created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language and the longest poem (23, 837 lines of iambic blank verse) in any language of the modem world. I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic... 83 The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, p. 119(1947). 84 The Hungry Eye, Ch 15 Expansions of Aesthetic Experience. See also Mother India, November 1958. 85 The English Language and the Indian Spirit, Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna, (1986), p. 7. 86 Ibid., p. 30. There is involved, in such a wish, a separation of abstractions ...
... is enlightened in thought and action, in attitude and disposition, full of love for all, every thing and being of this seamless universe. *Mulya, which is ordinarily said to be value in English language, is, literally speaking, what is to be obtained from mula, root, or source. Broadly speaking, while Science, in general, or Physics, in particular, is concerned with the world of things, Ethics... Ethics ( dharma) is, linguistically trace able to Greek ethikos (time-tested) custom, Sanskrit svadha essential indwelling or self) and concerned with beings. But thing/being discourse in English language smacks of a kind of dualism, as if suggesting that the world of thing is perhaps devoid of value. But if one enters into the heart of discourse via the Sanskrit-rooted languages, one easily realizes... precisely how the colonial value system was imposed on Indians through the education system. But was initiated and developed in the light of Macaulay's minutes on education. Through the medium of English language, education was provided to select few who were expected to imitate and imbibe the values of their colonial masters and percolate them down below. They were to be interpreters of western culture ...
... Kumar Roy) Theme 8. I am in general agreement with your answer to M's strictures on certain points in your style and your use of English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are not unquestionably valid; they would be so if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French;... boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the writer likes to make it. Stephen Phillips once said of it in a libertine image that the English language is like a woman who will not love you unless you take liberties with her.... As for "aspire for", it may be less correct than "aspire to" or "aspire after", but it is psychologically called ...
... it Eternity in Words . 5 Generation after generation will drink in its soul's nectar from this perennial source. The life span of the English language itself has increased a thousandfold. Shakespeare, it is said, increased the life span of the English language by centuries. Sri Aurobindo said about Shakespeare, "That kind of spear does not shake everywhere." Now we find another far greater that... sovereign potentiality he has foreseen. Dr. Piper of Syracuse University says about Savitri that it already has inaugurated the New Age of Illumination and is probably the greatest epic in the English language... the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed.... It ranges symbolically from primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest ...
... it Eternity in Words. 14 Generation after generation will drink in its soul's nectar from this perennial source. The life-span of the English language itself has increased a thousandfold. Shakespeare, it is said, increased the life-span of the English language by centuries. Sri Aurobindo said about Shakespeare: "That kind of spear does not shake everywhere." Now we find another far greater that... potentiality he has foreseen. Dr. Piper of Syracuse University says about Savitri that it already has inaugurated the New Age of Illumination and is probably the greatest epic in the English language... the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed .... It ranges symbolically from primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the ...
... soul. No doubt you have on your side the fact that no English dictionary, not even the OED, cites an example on 'the Divine' down the centuries. But the American Random House Dictionary of the English Language (College Edition, 1969) gives on p. 388, col. 2 seventeen uses of 'divine' and the eleventh use notes: 'the Divine', a. God, b. (sometimes I.e.) the spiritual aspect of a man; the group of... divine is to be found in every living thing...' "Finally, in addition to my early citation from the Random House Dictionary, let me quote Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language: 'Divine - often cap: something having the qualities and attributes of an ultimate reality that is regarded as sacred.' The example given is: 'man's relation to the Divine.' " My latest... growth of that association it becomes markedly common. The letters to the disciples teem with it, but nowhere does Sri Aurobindo give any sign that he was doing something somewhat unnatural in the English language. * Your ideal and aspiration are admirable when you say: "My one regret so far is that I am still to nurture a flower of purity, perfection and harmony in me to offer at the ...
... modern moods and techniques, refused to confine himself to them. He used the ______ 1 [Originally published in Mother India, January 1983, pp. 31-34.] Page 333 English language in varied ways to express high spiritual visions and experiences in the framework of a Legend that is a Symbol in the nearly 24,000 blank-verse lines of Savitri. It is therefore very surprising... grants that another has done so, it is anomalous for the former to adjudge the latter linguistically unskilful to a small extent everywhere. Again, how can one who is declared to have mastered the English language be said to make it move with a slightly clumsy gait throughout? Lastly, is it not odd to refer to "most beautiful passages" as being couched in a speech that is a trifle ill-adapted for use in... Aurobindo had "problems in English". Surely, he has himself been "a bit awkward" in the verdict he has given. What he should have said is that he, unlike Sri Aurobindo who had mastered the English language and shown his mastery in Savitri, could not venture on this language for his own epic but stick to his native Kannada over which he had a hold such as he could not claim over English. The propriety ...
... experiences. But we Indians must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse still: "spirituel" means in it "mentally sparkling" -even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be "spirituel"! The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The... Yoga-business which is so unmodernly unwestern is at bottom "bunk" and that hagiography is so very eastern and rubbishy and that no Indian can write admirable stuff in an admirable manner in the English language which has so many awe-inspiring names of English writers - these two strains instigate the overemphatic sneering at the book under review for not only treating its subject in a certain way but ...
... two poet-critics continued and led to the publication of two books - The English Language and The Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry. Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language... If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the disposal... its English was not by an Englishman?" After many arguments and counter-arguments, Kathleen Raine withdraws from the discussion by saying: "Of course if India is determined to adopt the English language nobody can stop you. The blame lies with the English, who as a 'ruling race' for two hundred years impressed India with the power and prestige of our brief moment of material supremacy." ...
... wrote to the author: "I am in general agreement with your answer to M's strictures on certain points in your style and your use of the English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are not unquestionably valid; they would be so only if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French;... boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the writer likes to make it, Stephen Phillips once said of it in a libertine image that the English language is like a woman who will not love you unless you take liberties with her." 1 1. The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo ...
... A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. Page 190 H is solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental ones or intuitions occurring on the summits of consciousness... seeing and experience. Truth first - a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express... should have appeared. Let us salute the Dawn." And one must congratulate him - the more because he is English - on his courage for having anticipated a hackneyed objection thus: "The English language has been given to the world and its usages and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the islanders whose tongue it originally Page 194 ...
... modern-minded writers never loses an opportunity to have a dig at Sri Aurobindo who, while fully conversant with all modern moods and techniques, refused to confine himself to them. He used the English language in varied ways to express high spiritual visions and experiences in the framework of a Legend that is a Symbol in the nearly 24,000 blank-verse lines of Savitri. It is therefore very surprising... another has done so, it is anomalous for the former to adjudge the latter linguistically unskilful to a small extent everywhere. Again, how can one who is declared to have mastered the English language be said to make it move with a slightly clumsy gait throughout? Lastly, is it not odd to refer to "most beautiful passages" as being couched in a speech that is a trifle ill-adapted for use in... Aurobindo had "problems in English". Surely, he has himself been "a bit awkward" in the verdict he has given. What he should have said is that he, unlike Sri Aurobindo who had mastered the English language and shown his mastery in Savitri, could not venture on this language for his own epic but stick to his native Kannada over which he had a hold such as he could not claim over English. The propriety ...
... Aurobindo's life and thought, his philosophy and yoga and politics and his other poems, are brought in only to make the appreciation of Savitri easy or complete. But Savitri is an epic in the English language, and it cannot be studied in a cultural vacuum. Savitri by itself, Savitri in relation to Sri Aurobindo's life and work, and Savitri in relation to the currents of human thought and experience... shakti the theme of his loftiest poetical flight. There is another circumstance, too, about this poem that deserves emphasis here. Savitri is the work of an Indian poet in the English language, a fact that must have a challenging significance today. Anglo-Indian literary relations are an absorbing subject and call for separate examination. But here one or two points are particularly... rg or Sydney or Vancouver or Madras." 5 He might have added "or Pondicherry". Another writer, Ronald Nixon (now Sri Krishnaprern), has also expressed the opinion that, "The English language has been given to the world and its usage and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the Islanders whose tongue it originally was. Those who would remain sole rulers ...
... or unbroken recurrence is imperative—though equivalence of sound values may be. It is a matter of the inner ear and its guidance rather than of any exact external measurements—especially in the English language, which is too free and plastic for the theories which Page 160 are sometimes imposed upon its movements. The theories don't matter much, because the language contrives to go its own... as you put it, can admit of only one answer. I cannot agree that nursery rhymes or folk songs are entitled to take an important place or any place at all in the history of the prosody of the English language or that one should start the study of English metre by a careful examination of the rhythm of "Humpty Dumpty", "Mary, Mary, quite contrary" or the tale of the old woman in a shoe. There are many ...
... —Ed. What do you say to today's poem? Page 491 Very fine, this time. Well, let us put it in English—without trying to be too literal, turning the phrases to suit the English language. If there are any mistakes of rendering they can be adjusted. At the day-end behold the Golden Daughter of Imaginations— She sits alone under the Tree of Life— A form of the Truth of Being... Certain turns of the style in this poem suggest an (perhaps subconscious) imitation of the liberties (not in correction, but bold or contracted terms) which Arjava occasionally takes with the English language, but Arjava's audacities are saved and justified by the abounding poetic energy of his diction and rhythm. I do not think you can afford to follow in that line—for that energy is not yours (otherwise ...
... things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the... seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express ...
... with diplomatic questions raised by unsettled thrones and touch-and-go balances of power? Besides, it is not likely that Bacon who was most apprehensive about the lasting value of the English language and wished all his works to be written in Latin should have spent Page 88 years creating masterpieces in a tongue he underrated if not despised. Perhaps the most decisive proof... nowhere do we come upon a mystic personation of his creative power. Page 99 Luckily, though, he did have fugitive moods which are interesting as clues to what is possible in the English language when the mystic hue enters the life-mind. There is a sonnet indicating one possibility: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array, ...
... underscoring of the ironical contrast, it cannot be denied that the contrast has its ironic potential in the poem. Sethna's pithy statement on the poem is that here is a poem in which the English language is charged with and moulded by a non-English and profoundly Indian spirit as Wordsworth here has actually expressed "with a deep intimacy his own spiritual trance of identification with... book contains many of the critical essays discussed here and further references to it will be from this edition and pagination will be incorporated into the text. 2. K.D. Sethna, The English Language and the Indian Spirit, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986), p. 38. 3. Ibid., p. 20. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 29. 6. Ibid., p. 23. Page 287 ...
... successfully avoids over-interpretation; and renders the inexplicit original in the English language with the same suggestive touch and tone. In short, Sethna, keeping in view Mallarmé the artist as well as Mallarmé the poet, preserves Mallarmé's mystery-in-obscurite even in the English language. JEYARAJ DANIEL Page 237 ...
... something quite outside the mainstream of English literature. In this sense it is true to say that what he has done is foreign to the English spirit. But in doing this he has not done violence to the English language. On the contrary: he has fulfilled something that was being striven for by its very greatest 'makers'. Something that they have strained for and touched momentarily at instants of peak-attainment... first half of the first canto of Book One. Here Sri Aurobindo achieves something that I believe has never been attempted elsewhere in world-literature, certainly nowhere else in the history of the English language. The only parallel might be found in the composition of the Rig Veda where, as Sri Aurobindo has shown, an inner psychological sense is carried by an outer one that is physical and ritual. For ...
... in attitude and disposition, full of love for all—every thing and being of this seamless universe. I LINGUISTIC ROOTS TO VALUE Mulya, which is ordinarily said to be value in English language, is, literally speaking, what is to be obtained from mula root, or source. Whether in the context of learning or in some other related contexts to get to the root [without remaining contented... (dharma) is, linguistically traceable to Grk. ethikos, [time-tested] custom, Sanskrit svadha [essential indwelling or self] and concerned with beings. But this thing/being discourse in English language smacks of a kind of dualism, as if suggesting that the world of thing is perhaps devoid of value. But if one enters into the heart of discourse via the Sanskrit-rooted languages, one easily realizes ...
... 369 I The Problem An American Professor of Philosophy, Raymond Frank Piper, has referred to Savitri as "probably the greatest epic in the English language" and has also ventured the judgment that, "...it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful, and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void... metaphorical brilliance... Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute." 1 Savitri is a great epic, probably the greatest in the English language; it has a cosmic range and comprehension, and a beautiful and perfect articulation; and its effect on the reader is to expand his mind "towards the Absolute". These are large ...
... arranged in the right rhythm. In short, the poetic is welded and fused with the actual, subjective truth with objective reality. The Irish poet, A.E., once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy that the English language was pitifully ill-equipped to convey spiritual ideas; but Sri Aurobindo could not subscribe to this view: Page 459 ...this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions... technique...Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new: it must now be urged to a farther new progress. 191 It was ...
... captivating fabric of sinuous and enchanting prose. Sri Aurobindo begins his Page 612 survey by subscribing to the general opinion that of all the modern European tongues the English language "has produced the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius". 9 After two chapters on the "character" of English poetry - chapters that are very perceptive... Aurobindo categorically declares that the hexameter, being a dactylic metre, "must remain unequivocally and patently dactylic", he nevertheless advocates, taking into consideration the genius of the English language, a large number and variety of modulations. 43 * Page 626 Freedom, yes, but only the freedom that answers an imperative rhythmical or emotional need, the freedom that moves ...
... spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low... true seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express ...
... and poet and he carried out his task in the English language, for which he had the greatest admiration and respect. Savitri was an epic in English with mantric potency. To talk of the literary intellectual and the spiritual traditions which gave Indian nationhood a character is also consequently to acknowledge the significance of the English language in our scheme of things. As a scholar of English ...
... first half of the first canto of Book One. Here Sri Aurobindo achieves something that... has never been attempted elsewhere in world-literature... certainly nowhere else in the history of the English language. The only parallel might be found in the composition of the Rig Veda where an inner psychological sense is, as Sri Aurobindo has shown, carried by an outer one that is physical and ritual. For... these legends and myths. But there are other aspects of 'influence' also. From the Indian tradition Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are present in Savitri as far as possible in the genius of the English language. Both inspiration and vision of the early Vedic poets have left their mark on Savitri; but it is the Upanishads that have directly contributed to the formulation of the new poetics. ...
... professor of Syracuse University in the USA, has given the following appraisal of Savitri: ‘During a period of nearly fifty years … [Sri Aurobindo] created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language … I venture the judgment that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth’s darkness... Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute.’ 2 With its 23,813 lines, Savitri is one of the longest poems in the English language. Its first version dates back as far as Sri Aurobindo’s Baroda period. No less than eleven and maybe twelve versions and revisions have been found. Originally a rather short narrative poem based ...
... y daring—unless he means "brocaded" dressed in brocade, and then he ought to have said "brocaded"; but otherwise it is a trouvaille [coinage] of audacious felicity, provided he can make the English language absorb so violent a turn given to the word. There is no reason why the poem should not be published in the Orient. May 26, 1931 Your poem is very pretty in feeling and music... beauty and power and also its depth of psychological and spiritual feeling and knowledge. I have made only a few alterations where it seemed to me necessary in order to satisfy the turns of the English language. For instance "spicy urge broken by mortification" "azure melody of attainment" "peak roots the gloom" are in English a little strange and forced; I have substituted turns which ran better into ...
... experiences. But we must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse stilt: spirituel means in it "mentally sparkling" - even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be spirituel! The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The ...
... things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these "high light" words are few in the English language. This solution may do well enough for him, because the realisations which they represent are in him mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare "high... true seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express ...
... his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one of the greatest contemporary poets in the English language. Mr. Lal seems to have been exceptionally unfortunate in his choice of Sri Aurobindo as a whipping post. His own personal preference is for "realistic poetry, reflecting... the din and... cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lal's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty- first year in Eng land), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism. If he is in addition an ...
... Origins; 3. Talks on Poetry; 4. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo; 5. The Enigmas of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; 6. The Obscure and the Myysterious: A research in Mallarme’s Symbolist Poetry; 7. The English Language and the Indian Spirit; 8. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo; 9. Blake’s Tyger: A Christological Interpretation; 10. Indian Poets and English Poetry; 11. The Beginning of History for Israel;... But there is nowhere any levity in his now famous humour although there is much of light there. And along with it there is always the glow of intellectual delight. K.D.S. once aptly remarked: “English language has a word which can very aptly suggest light’s being included in laughter. the word is ‘delight’.” This applies so fittingly to all his humorous writings. His humour is always aglow with some ...
... explain a subject correctly and command their attention. That is as much as we can ask of our teachers at present. Only head (c) should be rather carefully attended to especially with regard to the English Language. Head (d) should be dropped altogether; discipline especially is a matter for the Head Master to testify; it is impossible for the examiners to test it, since the boys would be on their best behaviour ...
... staff were not only Bepin Pal and Sri Aurobindo but some other very able writers, Shyam Sundar Chakravarty, Hemendra Prasad Ghose and Bejoy Chatterji. Shyam Sundar and Bejoy were masters of the English language, each with a style of his own; Shyam Sundar caught up something like Sri Aurobindo's way of writing and later on many took his articles for Sri Aurobindo's. But after a time dissensions arose ...
... subsequently into English, very likely by the Mother herself. The other pieces in this part appear to have been written originally in English. They are among the Mother’s first compositions in the English language. "Impressions of Japan", dated 9 July 1915, was written in Akakura and published in the form reproduced here in the Modern Review (Calcutta) in January 1918. "The Children of Japan", an incomplete ...
... poetic rapture over Shacuntala. We do not know whom we should congratulate more, the poet of the Press Bill or his admirer. Anarchism Are we not entitled, by the way, in the interests of the English language, to protest against the misapplication of the word Anarchists to the Indian Terrorists and Anarchism to their policy? Their methods are wild and lawless, their effort is to create anarchy; but ...
... thousand newspapers and acquits him of political sin. But of course Mr. Morley's crowning mercy is the phrase about the fur coat. It is true that the simile about the coat is not new in the English language; for a man who abandons his principles has always been said to turn his coat; but never has that profitable manoeuvre been justified in so excellently literary and philosophic a fashion before ...
... or Nationalists, but were called by their opponents "Extremists", wanted to make the Indian National Congress a dynamic political organisation with an aggressive policy. All the Indian-owned English-language dailies of Calcutta were in the control of men of moderate if not loyalist views. From the end of 1905, the Nationalists discussed the desirability of starting their own English daily; but nothing ...
... thought of the time to the full height and power of what the intellect of the race could then think out or create in the light of the inheritance of our ages. A small number of writers—in the English language Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin are the best known among these names,—build for us a bridge of transition from the intellectual transcendentalism of the earlier nineteenth century across a subsequent ...
... sing. By this effort and his singularity and absorption he stands apart solitary and remote, a unique voice among the poets of the time; he occupies indeed a place unique in the poetry of the English language, for there is no other singer of the beyond who is like him or equal to him in the strangeness, supernatural lucidity, power and directness of vision of the beyond and the rhythmic clarity and ...
... and within this constant scheme the metre allows of any variation in the number and placing of the accents. Thus the rhythm obtained is purely accentual, in accordance with the genius of the English language; but a new freedom has been achieved within the confines of a new kind of discipline."—Lascelles Abercrombie , Poetry: Its Music and Meaning (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 35. ...
... last words would be , which is just the metre of the even lines in my poem. The rhythm is at once accentual and quantitative. I quite agree that you cannot ignore the accentual basis of the English language, but what you can do is to take account of both stress accent and quantity, assuming it as a rule that a major and true accent (as opposed to minor and fictitious ones) is sufficient to transform ...
... the British Empire may lead to the development of an Anglo-Celtic life and culture better for the world than the separate development of the two elements. India by the partial possession of the English language has been able to link herself to the life of the modern world and to reshape her literature, life and culture on a larger basis and, now that she is reviving her own spirit and ideals in a new ...
... increases the strength of the artist by the measure of the difficulty conquered and can be thrown into shapes at once of beauty and of concentrated power. That is eminently the character of the English language. At any rate we have this long continuity of poetic production. And once supposing a predominantly Anglo-Saxon or, more strictly an Anglo-Norman national mind moved to express itself in poetry ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter VII The Character of English Poetry - I Of all the modern European tongues the English language—I think this may be said without any serious doubt,—has produced, not always the greatest or most perfect, but at least the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius. The unfettered play ...
... of a line or part of a line but does not alter its metrical values. 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 ...
... Future Poetry Metre and the Three Elements of English Rhythm There are three elements which constitute the general exterior forms of rhythm in the English language,—accent, stress, quantity. Each of them can be made in theory the one essential basis of metre, relegating the other indispensable elements to the position of subordinate factors which help out ...
... completeness and provided there is no long-continued floundering among perverted inspirations or half motives, the old literatures may enter rejuvenated into a new creative cycle. The poetry of the English language in direct relation to which I have made these suggestions, has certain disadvantages for the task that has to be attempted but also certain signal advantages. It is a literature that has long ...
... that it must be a false metre pretending to be a native one. The hexameter has not to pretend to be in everyday garb, for it is admittedly a new dress, but it has to fit perfectly the body of the English language. It may use the Sprung Rhythm which is also not an everyday garb, but a dress novel, reinvented and artistically fashioned. It seems to me that "meretricious" here means simply new and unfamiliar ...
... which it is difficult to represent accurately in any other language than the ancient Sanskrit tongue in which alone they have been to some extent systematised. The only approximate terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body ...
... it is also governed by a discriminating mind so that her generosity does not run away with her and go helter-skelter. It is she who financed the publication of our old series of letters: The English Language and the Indian Spirit. Her most wonderful, though some might call it most blunderful, act is her being after me to bring out that far-from-marketable commodity, my Collected Poems! (14.11 ...
... Bengali by birth, he was yet educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England, first at St. Paul's School, London, and then at King's College, Cambridge. Over and above using the English language as if it were his mother-tongue, he was a brilliant classical scholar who made his mark not only at Cambridge but also in the open competition for the I.C.S. by his record scoring in Greek ...
... Grow in Greatness? Our Ancient Wisdom and Its Genuine Revival Our Real National Anthem The Ideal Flag for India Pacifism and the Indian Spirit The Significance of the English Language in India Sri Aurobindo - The Poet: Rejoinders to Recent Criticisms The Central Sarojini A Defence of Hinduism The Real Gandhi: An Impartial Estimate of ...
... that spirituality, even if under an aesthetic aspect, is necessary is important and significant. And it is also important and significant that the two most purely poetic minds who have used the English language were openly lit up with a sense of the spiritual, however mentalised and not directly Yogic that sense might have been. Perhaps here we have a pointer that supreme work on a supreme scale is possible ...
... The dewy leaves among. The words "bare" and "ruin" which are so effective in Shake-speare's line recur in one of Milton's, which has led a critic to aver that it is the most musical in the English language: To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. Nothing of paramount importance seems said here, though "Athe- Page 92 nian" has considerable associations in the European ...
... sinister suggestions for an English ear. But to a Russian it is just. what to an Englishman would be a name like Higgin-bottom. A Russian once remarked that to him the most musical word in the English language was "coal-scuttle", which stands for a pail to carry coals in. All the more if we do not know a language well we fall under the spell of certain sounds. That reminds me in general of the magical ...
... conducted by the universities. In our colleges we conduct a four-year course. A college student usually studies a single subject and for that purpose special emphasis is given to the use of the English language. In spite of that, English is not given primary importance in the syllabus of our system of National Education; it has the status of a second language. A student must be able to stand on his ...
... nation. Both these movements seek to develop our national energies and the habit of independence; that is the real meaning of Swadeshi as we understand it in Bengal. I am addressing you in the English language. I am an Indian. You are all Indians. I am trying to preach to the nation certain ideas which will bring prosperity to our country. I got my education in England, and so I can express my thoughts ...
... connections are familiar licences in English poetry—of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some other, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties one must be a master of the language—and ...
... Herbert stated: "Sri Aurobindo's Ili on is a remarkable achievment by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our English language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality" (Letter, June 5, 1958). 1 P. 108. Page 131 ...
... advise you to add to your technical equipment some understanding of the metrical needs of the inspiration. About this, anon. English metre is based on stress. Let us not forget that the English language is a language of stresses. It is never enough to know the correct pronunciation of English words in order to speak Page 48 English with an English intonation. We must deliver ...
... not come to measure things that are; They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen.... (Words) RANAJIT SARKAR Notes and References 1. The English Language and The Indian Spirit. Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry, 1986, p. 2, 2. Sri Aurobindo, Karmayoga, Birth Centenary Library, Pondicherry, Vol. 3 ...
... epic must be counted as remarkable among even the world's remarkable achievements. With its 23,806 lines, covered by Twelve Books, each mostly of several Cantos, it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 lines to the place of runner-up. Among the world's epics which can in general be compared with it in sustained poetic quality, only ...
... had myself struggled with this verse form. It is a Petrarchan sonnet, named for the great Italian poet who invented it, and because of its demanding rhyme scheme it is not easily adapted to the English language. Sri Aurobindo had mastered it easily -and Amal too succeeded brilliantly: As each gigantic vision of sky-rim Preludes yet stranger spaces of the sea, For those who dare the ...
... proclaims that Brightness falls from the air Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closed Helen's eye... Here are "some of the most delicately magical lines in the English language." Do we respond to their charm? The modern mind has no patience for that; that is its tragedy. Sri Aurobindo's modernism does not rest at all in the sordid and the ugly. In him there ...
... incarnated here, and if they are “a spark of the Divine” it must be the rationale of their incarnation. Sri Aurobindo was not only a classical scholar and a generally recognized master of the English language, he was also widely read in cultural, political and scientific matters. His evaluation of science was not the negation by the stereotypical bearded mystic, it was positive. Behind the mono-dimensional ...
... words inadequate to express the experiences, which therefore to us at first sight seem unthinkable, unimaginable, and maybe weird or outlandish. We know that Sri Aurobindo was a master of the English language; the Mother, in her way, was a master of French, if only to express such completely new, complex and transmental experiences in simple and clear words. In this process of transformation some ...
... think we need be more queasy than Englishmen themselves. Of course there were special circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don’t find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these ...
... Later Aravinda would study at the renowned St. Paul’s School in London and at King’s College in Cambridge. While still a student, and throughout his life, he was recognised for his mastery of the English language. Also, Cambridge made him into a classical scholar. Yet he did not become what his father wanted him to be: a member of the prestigious Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.), five thousand of whom ruled ...
... latter wrote: ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Ilion is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our English language as such, but of its skillful elaboration in poetic diction of such high quality.’ 8 Golconde, a guest house for visitors of the Ashram, planned by the Mother in the Thirties and built under ...
... been highly placed by good English critics, and I don't think that we need be more queasy than Englishmen themselves. Of course there were special circumstances; I don't find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on people will become more and more polyglot and these ...
... But he left Cambridge in October 1892 as a gentleman and a classical scholar who would keep the knowledge acquired there for the rest of his life, both as a generally recognized master of the English language and as one who was widely read, also in the life of revolutionaries such as Jeanne d’Arc, Giuseppe Mazzini, Garibaldi and Charles Parnell. In August 1892 he passed his final examination for ...
... Save there where joy lives self-eternalised? You are welcome to visit India and me at your convenience and hold discussions on poetry. Yes, both Savitri and Ilion which mould the English language with a technical as well as semantic mastery have to be carefully probed before they wear a non-English garb. Ilion is less chockful of audacities than Savitri, but some turns of phrase in it ...
... successors - Page 172 Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair. Dust hath closed Helen's eye - are some of the most delicately magical in the English language. But it is reported that the opening verse which has a psychic pathos has come to us accidentally in its present form! Nashe is supposed to have actually written: Brightness falls from the ...
... Raine and me over nearly three years and has now been published under the caption, Indian Poets and English Poetry in succession to the earlier exchanges which have come out as The English Language and the Indian Spirit. It is hoped that the third volume of Life-Poetry-Yoga will prove welcome not only to old readers but also to new ones into whose hands it may chance to fall ...
... Page 59 Both in quality and quantity Savitri must be counted as remarkable even among the world's major achievements. With its 23,813 lines, 1 it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 to the place of runner-up: in fact it is the longest in any European language old or new, with the exception of Nicos Kazantzakis's ...
... traders several years after they had been prepared in Rome". Vidyabhūsana postulates "traders" because, according to him, "it is almost 1. Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (1956), p. 697, col. 2. 2. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1906, p. 1. Page 451 certain that Rome did not attempt to spread eastwards till the later years of the ...
... with you, along with the prayer that the Mother may look after you and make you an ever sweeter child of hers. (20.12.1988) Congratulations on your coining a new word and enriching the English language! It is new and yet the most natural-seeming. You have written "lightful" and added to the store of beautiful English adjectives. I wonder why nobody before thought of a word-formation which could ...
... Raine and me over nearly three years and is now being published under the caption, Indian Poets and English Poetry in succession to the earlier exchanges which have come out as The English Language and the Indian Spirit. It is hoped that the first volume of Life-Poetry-Yoga will prove welcome not only to old readers but also to new ones into whose hands it may chance to fall - fe ...
... not hear "Le moment est venu" but "The time has come" was, as I have put it, the Englishman's touch, and Sri Aurobindo was the Englishman! (laughter) He had not only a greater mastery over the English language than any born Englishman but also something of the sang-froid raised Page 82 to the spiritual plane: the Englishman's typical composure, coolness, in danger or agitating ...
... in English poetry, - of course, it is Page 283 incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the language ...
... double aspect of the poetic phenomenon - and particularly of a super-phenomenon like Savitri - will differ from reader to reader, depending on the inner sensitivity and on the intimacy with the English language. But all readers will receive the maximum they can by reciting Savitri instead of simply running the eye over the page. As for the "how" and "where" of poetry becoming yoga and yoga poetry ...
... possible artistic limits, the yearning and battles of mankind for eternal life.... During a period of nearly fifty years... I Sri AurobindoT created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language... . I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's ...
... Sri Aurobindo something which is causeless and eternally existing for itself. And had there been no music, austerity, nobility and chasteness, Milton's poem would have been the dullest in the English language. The case is the reverse in Sri Aurobindo. Had there been no other element, delight alone would have carried along the sweep of his epic. Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds ...
... of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible artistic limits, the yearnings and battles of mankind for eternal life. Sri Aurobindo created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language and the longest poem in any language of the modern world. I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges ...
... very interesting analyses of its imagery, similes, diction, symbolism, Overmind stylistics or epic qualities, these essays point to a new poetry and poetics established by Sri Aurobindo in the English language, what he himself has called "the future poetry." Indeed, Savitri appears as an enigma in the field of contemporary poetry and its critical norms, paralleling naturally the enigma represented ...
... and times. He has shown, by his grand work, the lines along which an epic writer should move today. Sri Aurobindo utilised his remarkable poetical capacity in writing an epic in the English language in which he embodied his grand vision of the Spirit. It is a well known fact that the poet had devoted himself to the pursuit of spirituality, the foundation of the Indian culture. He is not ...
... which it is difficult to represent accurately in any other language than the ancient Sanskrit tongue in which alone they have been to some extent systematised. The only approximate terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross ...
... (1981) 21. Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue (1981) 22. "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1984) 23. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence with Kathleen Raine (1986) 24. Poems of Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments (1987) 25. The Obscure and the Mysterious: ...
... The question as it is put can admit of only one answer. I am not aware that nursery rhymes or folk songs take any important place or any place at all in the history of the prosody of the English language or that one starts the study of English metre by a careful examination of the rhythm of "Humpty Dumpty, " "Mary, Mary, quite contrary" or the tale of the old woman who lived in a shoe. There ...
... volumes and other volumes such as Sri Aurobindo's 'The Life Divine’, 'The Synthesis of Yoga’, 'Letters on Yoga’, "The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth’, 'Savitri’ — an epic written in the English language, as also 'The Mother's Conversations’, 'Questions and Answers’, and several others show that no change has been more radical than the evolution attempted by means of this new synthesis of yoga ...
... thousand newspapers and acquits him of political sin. "... of course Mr. Morley's crowning mercy is the phrase about the fur-coat. It is true that the simile about the coat is not new in the English language; for a man who abandons his principles has always been said to turn his coat; but never has that profitable manoeuvre been justified in so excellently literary and philosophical a fashion before ...
... into your meditation instead of sending through Nolini [the secretary]! No objection to sleep - the land of Nod has also its treasures. 42 (24)NB: I am thinking of doing some studies in English language, not for any creative purpose, but for recreation. With this aim in view, I want to take up your immortal philosophy - though my walnut of a brain can't do much with it — and if you will ...
... to bring down the supramental power and principle in the earth life is well known to the elite of humanity. What however is less known of him is his most remarkable and original contribution to English language and literature. His letters, essays, aphorisms, poems, dramas and philosophical writings stand out as something unique in literature both as regards the originality of their thought-points as ...
... Underworlds in his wide penetrating vision. Dr. Piper of Syracuse University says about Savitri that it already has inaugurated the New Age of Illumination and is probably the greatest epic in the English language ... the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed.... It ranges symbolically from primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest ...
... technique can produce successful or unsuccessful rhythms (live or dead rhythms). One has to learn to distinguish by the ear, and the difficulty for you is to get the right sense of the cadences of the English language. That is not easy, for it has many outer and inner elements. September 8, 1938 "Mortality fades away with dim footfalls From the measureless beauty of my life divine." "Life" ...
... his hand, rubbing his hand on his hips, putting his hand in his mouth, and wiping the board again, this time with spit] - he used to do like this! (Laughter) Our Indian teachers of the English language will, perhaps, give their students some idea of these correct stresses. So you see here - 'divine' [stressing the second syllable] as we say, not 'divine'. We're not particular about how we ...
... people in the Jallianwalabagh incident in 1919. At the same time, the British, to serve their own purpose, set up educational institutions that imparted Western education through the English language and had established a vast railway network and telegraph lines. This brought the country some kind of administrative unity. But they also began a systematic exploitation of the Indian people. ...
... to the belief that that race is fundamentally hostile to us, and our true policy is to reconcile the Hindus". The advent of the education system brought in by the British through the English language saw the Hindus adapting themselves rapidly to the new situation. As a result, the Hindus broke new ground in almost all fields, whether it was education, business or in the professions. ...
... peerless presiding deities of Italian and Greek respectively. Properly speaking Tagore may not be classed Page 177 with them. But just as Shakespeare may be said to have led the English language across the border or as Tolstoy made the Russian language join hands with the wide world or as Virgil and Goethe imparted a fresh life and bloom, a fuller awakening of the soul of poetry, to Latin ...
... the Arya I could not understand anything, so I gave it up. Sri Aurobindo : Many people cannot understand it. The Arya requires two things. First of all, a thorough knowledge of the English language which many Indians have not got. And secondly, it requires a mind that is subtle and comprehensive. I wrote the Arya , really speaking, for myself. I wanted to throw out certain things that were ...
... Bihar. British rule with its provincial administration did not unite these peoples but it did impose upon them the habit of a common type of administration, a closer intercommunication through the English language and by the education it gave there was created a more diffused and more militant form of patriotism, the desire for liberation and the need of unity in the struggle to achieve that liberation ...
... world forces of ignorance and falsehood, their lord is the anti-Divine, ¹ These lines of Marlowe are often quoted by Sri Aurobindo as an example to show the height of poetic beauty which the English language is capable of expressing. Page 399 whose name is Satan. A legend says that at the beginning of creation there was a wager between God and Satan. Satan said: "I am here to win ...
... possible artistic limits, the yearning and battles of mankind for eternal life.... During a period of nearly fifty years... {Sri Aurobindo} created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language.... I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's ...
... (Dharma) in Bengali, writing most of the articles himself, his Page 50 control over the language was not quite as consummate or fluent as over English. While he could make the English language, a fit and natural vehicle for the expression of the roll and thunder of politics as also of the peaceful sublime of spiritual fervour or ecstasy, he could never address, to his regret, a Bengali ...
... of Sudhir Kumar Sarkar of May 11, 1908 ( The statement of accused aged about 18 years, made before Mr. L. Birley, Magistrate of the 1st Class, at Alipore on the 11th day of May 1908, in the English Language .) Sudhir’s confession : Q: Do you wish to make a statement to me? A: Yes. Q: Do you understand that I am a Magistrate and that anything which you say to me can be used as evidence against ...
... Sri Aurobindo : Yes, but the Professor is an Indian. He is not an Englishman. It is these people who have learnt the language that want to use current phrases. As Richard Stephenson said, "English language is like a woman who loves you for taking liberty with her." Once Sir D.-V. sent me one of his books and on every page I found 40 such worn out expressions, what they call cliche and all the Indians ...
... staff were not only Bepin Pal and Sri Aurobindo but some other very able writers, Shyam Sundar Chakravarty, Hemendra Prasad Ghose and Bejoy Chatterjee. Shyam Sundar and Bejoy were masters of the English language, each with a style of his own; Shyam Sundar caught up something like Sri Aurobindo’s way of writing and later on many took his articles for Sri Aurobindo’s. But after a time dissensions arose ...
... idea of Avatarhood is translated into the reality of unfolding contemporary history. It is a comprehensively formulated epic simile, and the images of Indian tradition and the idiom of the English language fuse creatively in the masterly elaboration and splendid articulation of the entire essay. One who reads the Bande Mataram articles today will be struck - as their readers of about ...
... Burke's French Revolution. As his method of teaching consisted in going to the roots, one could never forget what he taught, even though the whole text was not completed. His mastery of the English language was phenomenal. Sometimes," disclosed Didmishe, "he examined our composition books. He wrote on them such remarks as 'Fit for Standard III' and 'How have you come to the College ?' "I was ...
... Honorary Magistrate of Khoolna Sadar Independent Bench with Powers of 2 nd Class Magistrate, Power to try summarily offences under Section 261; Empowered to take down evidence in criminal cases in English language and also authorized to sit singly." Page 158 in a large ground — there were several outbuildings consisting of a kitchen, a poultry, a cowshed, a stable for the horses who pulled ...
... Secretariat. Presumably the Gaekwad thought that A. Ghose now knew thoroughly the workings of various departments of his State. He also recognized the superb command the young man had over the English language. So from then onwards the Maharaja not only entrusted him with drawing up dispatches or orders at the Secretariat, but also employed him for his own work. Most of the personal work for the ...
... last week and have done the same this week,—in order to show that this gentleman who claims a monopoly of culture and wisdom in India, is a half educated shallow man whose boasted mastery of the English language even is imperfect and who in other subjects, such as history and politics, is an ignoramus pretending to knowledge. Page 661 ...
... just as by Indian trade is always meant Anglo-Indian trade and by Indian prosperity the prosperity of Anglo-India. This is a sort of official slang which has become a recognised idiom of the English language. Anglo-India is equal to India, India is equal to the East, therefore Anglo-India is the East. The Anglo-Indian has mastered the practice of the Vedanta, for he sees himself as the whole world ...
... in the next sentence how this alleged indiscretion of a few young men at the Mela could produce so fearful a riot? We cannot credit the Statesman with sufficient dullness or ignorance of the English language as to suppose that its distortion of Mr. Mudholkar's argument is not deliberate. And when, may we ask, was it "definitely established" that the indiscretion of a few Volunteers was the cause ...
... Karmayogin Uttarpara Speech Delivered at Uttarpara, Bengal, on 30 May 1909. Text published in the Bengalee, an English-language newspaper of Calcutta, on 1 June; thoroughly revised by Sri Aurobindo and republished in the Karmayogin on 19 and 26 June. When I was asked to speak to you at the annual meeting of your sabha , it was my intention ...
... Alwar's poetry; 2 but it has suffered considerably in the translation,—indeed the genius of the Tamil tongue hardly permits of an effective rendering, so utterly divergent is it from that of the English language. Page 468 × The form of the question reminds one of Epictetus' definition of man, "Thou art a little ...
... "become towards us". × I have translated these passages with as close a literalness as the English language will admit. Let the reader compare the original and judge whether this is not the sense of the verses. ...
... of spirituality, an Ashram with hundreds of disciples, sprang up with him as its centre. A magnificent leonine personality — a writer educated from boyhood in England and using the English language like a mother-tongue in splendid poetry as well as prose - a scholar in Greek and Latin — at home in French, German and Italian, not to mention Sanskrit and other Indian languages — once a politician ...
... 8. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. Ill 9. Pamessians 10 "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 11. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and ...
... -Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. II 8.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. III 9.Parnassians 10."Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 11.The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12.Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13.The Obscure and ...
... referring to it was quite substantial. I am glad you have gone through the Appendix, but I have the suspicion that it suggests Appendicitis to you... By the way I am bringing out in book form The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, 500 copies in paperback: This is my first - and almost certainly the last and sole - publishing venture with my ...
... Hyderabad: Institute of Human Study. 22. 1984 "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" : The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets, New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. 23. 1986 The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D.Sethna. Pondicherry: K.D. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 24. 1987 Poems by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with ...
... be heard in the heart of the aesthetic sense. A burst like this — and it is one among many in the nine hundred and odd lines of Love and Death — sums up centuries of poetic evolution of the English language. There is the phrase of swift felicity: ...the thrilled eternal smile that makes The spring. There is the phrase of power mingled with piquancy: ...knit life to life ...
... the Mother. Both in quality and quantity Savitri must be counted as remarkable even among the world's remarkable achievements. With its 23,813 lines,* it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 to the place of runner-up: in fact it is the longest in any European language old or new, with the exception of Nicos Kazantzakis's ...
... to where, far below, a dark planet moves ponderously in its orbit around the sun. Sri Aurobindo is showing us our earth "abandoned in the hollow gulfs". He calls upon all the resources of the English language as if to counterbalance with the weight of his words the sullen inertia of the circling globe. It is heavy, dull, opaque, impassive, soulless—with more than a score of adjectives Sri Aurobindo ...
... Nishikanta sent a Bengali poem: —U¦—UU¦—UU —U¦—UU¦—UU U—¦U—¦UU UUU¦—UU To that he wrote: "Your model this time is exceedingly difficult for the English language — for the reason that except in lines closing with triple rhymes the language draws back from a regular dactylic ending....! have at any rate made the following attempt: Winged with¦ ...
... South India and at an advanced age; he had been one of the leading revolutionary politicians in his country and was at one time considered “the most dangerous man in India”; he was a master of the English language who wrote more than thirty substantial volumes of philosophy, psychology and spirituality. He was thoroughly familiar with the Western as well as with the Eastern tradition and history, and proposed ...
... change.” 950 A.A. Ghose left Cambridge as a classical scholar and a gentleman; he would keep the knowledge acquired there for the rest of his life, both as a generally recognized master of the English language and as a man possessing a broad general knowledge. But Aravinda did no longer want to join the Indian Civil Service. Influenced by his father, who sent him examples of colonial misrule from ...
... would have to write a book about what he did not do in his life, to contradict the many false rumours, is long past. We know of his fame as a classical Cambridge scholar and a master of the English language; we know of his years in Baroda and his study of the Indian culture and its classical literature; and we know of his crucial role as an Indian politician and freedom fighter. In all these years ...
... prevent you from having it. Push them aside for good and see this simple inner truth in a simple and straightforward way—the back of the difficulty will be broken. May 1934 The English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian or Bengali—no language with a Teutonic base can Page 52 but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful ...
... impressionist and incisive than most English poetry; the qualities or defects noted above came into Bengali under the English influence. I don't see therefore the point of his remark that the English language cannot express the Indian temperament. It is true of course to a certain extent, first, because no foreign language can express what is intimate and peculiar to a national temperament, it tends ...
... who, then you are a no doubt!" I am sure the squabblers understood each other and we can also intuit the drift of their squabble. Perhaps some day these delicious Indianisms will get into the English language. And why not? English has several oddities of its own already and Americanisms are fast making headway. At least many Indian words have become current coin in England. There is, chief of all ...
... this 'quite the thing' is so rare a trouvaille , it is as illusive as the capture of Eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable: Bengali, like French, is very clear ...
... is best considered the aura of Ananda and this ultimate nature of it is realised best by the mind's putting its own individuality helplessly in the care of the Unthinkable, the Unnamable. The English Language has a word which can very aptly suggest Light's being included in Laughter: the word "Delight." (15.6.1990) Page 82 SHAW AND SRI AUROBINDO A Letter from ...
... utterance met with in the major Upanishads, carrying with it an echo of some rhythm infinitely vibrating out of a stupendous Unknowable, is indeed d a rara avis in the atmosphere of the English language. Hardly any recent poet of the British Isles writing with a marked mystical penchant shows even a glimmer of it. AE has filled his verse with a wonderful simplicity of soul-vision; Yeats of ...
... this 'quite the thing' is so rare a trouvaille, it is as illusive as the capture of Eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable: Bengali, like French, is very clear ...
... felt by him to be of so much Page 112 value that he does not care to tackle a foreign language on his own initiative. I think we are missing very precious pleasures. For, the English language can have expressive effects, especially of a mystical type, which no other modern tongue can rival, and whoever is able to handle English poetically should do so. Nishikanto is a superbly endowed ...
... Rupert Brooke had the greatest promise, though none of his once-famous sonnets had the grim heart-break of Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth", which some critics rank as one of the finest in the English language. Brooke was more inclined to be romantically sentimental. But he had a gift of crystallised phrase, as we may see from "The Great Lover", and once he achieved a wonderful piece of half-symbolist ...
... my breath away by adding that, because in my letter I used words like "tried", "attempted", "sought" when I spoke of producing poetry of a mystic and spiritual order new in many respects to the English language, you drew the conclusion that I wrote my poems with a manufacturing mentality which thought out with intellectual labour all the phrases, linked up the different parts like a mechanic rivetting ...
... INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER* SOME CRITICAL NOTES This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though ...
... description of things nor dwelt so much with a revealing eye on the divinity of his "rosy-fingered Dawn". At last the power and beauty of the old quantitative hexameter has come into its own in the English language. At last there is the absolute control which incessantly varies the music without hurting the instrument. Each line is alert with its undulating or bounding life and all the lines hang together ...
... An inadequate substitute on the whole - but the phrase "tears of things" is by itself flawless in summing up the fact of a fundamental sorrowfulness in the stuff of earthly life. Wherever the English language is spoken, men think of the Virgilian "tears of things" and regard that small snatch of poetic speech as the truest and loveliest bit of insight into the core of our perishable world. So it would ...
... is a rare birthday tribute to "the saviour love" of the Mother. Among other illuminating essays are those on Sri Aurobindo as the Poet of Integralism, on the importance of the English language and of French culture to India, and on Essence as viewed by Shankara and Sri Aurobindo. In a word, then, here in this well-produced volume on Sri Aurobindo's Vision and Work, is gathered ...
... to have ever seen such aspects is the world's idea of sanity. But, for the mystic poet, these things are realities. The language is a discovery. Sri Aurobindo tells us that in the past the English language has been plastic enough to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; "it must now be urged to a further new progress. In fact, the power is there and has only ...
... Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. II 10. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. Ill 11 . "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 12. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13 . Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 14. The Obscure ...
... connections are familiar licenses in English poetry, — of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties Page 191 taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties ...
... Power, as well as with the "image of immortality" there. Besides, there are his invaluable works on Indology, books where we see insight at every page, and also his letters on the English Language and the Indian Spirit. Year after year, Sethna has renewed himself, updated himself, with a passion to remain young for ever. The result is an incredible bulk of prose writings. With so ...
... Mother. Now I am seeing the original paintings. I am really happy." The pictures of William Blake were mystically ethereal. He was a great well-known artist as well as a renowned poet in the English language. Not content to see his poems only in a written or printed form, he clothed them in design and colour so that each poem-picture formed an artistic whole. Also there were rooms which displayed ...
... the final form I shall probably risk the ambiguity and reject the intruding "once". 19 April 1932 The Genesis of Winged with dangerous deity Your model is exceedingly difficult for the English language—for this reason that except in lines closing with triple rhymes the Page 234 language draws back from a regular dactylic ending—more still from a dactylic last foot to a stanza. It ...
... technique can produce successful or unsuccessful rhythms (live or dead rhythms). One has to learn to distinguish by the ear, and the difficulty for you is to get the right sense of the cadences of the English language. That is not easy, for it has many outer and inner elements. 8 September 1938 Rhythmical Overtones and Undertones I was speaking of rhythmical overtones and undertones. That is to say ...
... it. It is therefore that which we have to bring from behind to the front in the Yoga. The word "soul", as also the word "psychic", is used very vaguely and in many different senses in the English language. More often than not in ordinary parlance no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire—the false soul or ...
... of a romance in Sanskrit and he has therefore made the spirit and even partly the form of the language more Indian than English. It is not therefore useful for getting into the spirit of the English language. Indians have naturally in writing English a tendency to be too coloured, sometimes flowery, sometimes rhetorical and a book like this would increase the tendency. One ought to have in writing ...
... if you would have him follow it. But Mr. Cousins has done a great service to the Indian mind by giving it at all a chance to follow this direction with such a guide to point out the way. The English language and literature is practically the only window the Indian mind, with the narrow and meagre and yet burdensome education given to it, possesses into the world of European thought and culture; but ...
... quantitative metres of Virgil, Ovid, Horace. It was also natural that some of these innovators should conceive that this could be best done by imposing the classical laws of quantity wholesale on the English language. At the first attempt a difference of view on this very point arose; there was a bifurcation of paths, but neither of these branchings led anywhere near the goal. One led nowhere at all, there ...
... impressionist and incisive than most English poetry; the qualities or defects noted above came into Bengali under the English influence. I don't see therefore the point of his remark that the English language cannot express the Indian temperament. It is true of course to a certain extent, first, because no foreign language can express what is intimate and peculiar in a national temperament, it tends ...
... But this "quite the thing" is so rare a trouvaille , it is as illusive as the capture of eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable. Bengali, like French, is very clear ...
... in a more plastic way by Shakespeare and Milton. All depends on the skill which one brings to the work and the tool is quarrelled with only when the workman does not know how to use it. The English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian or Bengali—no language with a Teutonic base can be—but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful handling be made to ...
... divinity and that of the Mother or of certain aspects of the Asram life; these things have been kept private for the Asram itself, and its inmates and the disciples—especially anything in the English language. In later pages of the book all that can be fruitfully said about the life of the Asram and the position of the Mother in the eyes of the disciples and in their life has been said and that should ...
... Behar. British rule with its provincial administration did not unite these peoples but it did impose upon them the habit of a common type of administration, a closer intercommunication through the English language and by the education it gave there was created a more diffused and more militant form of patriotism, the desire for liberation and the need of unity in the struggle to achieve that liberation ...
... in it. It is therefore that which we have to bring from behind to the front in the yoga. The word 'soul', as also the word 'psychic', is used very vaguely and in many different senses in the English language. More often than not, in ordinary parlance, no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire —the false soul ...
... Bihar. British rule with its provincial administration did not unite these peoples but it did impose upon them the habit of a common type of administration, a closer intercommunication through the English language and by the education it gave there was a created a more diffused and more militant form of patriotism, the desire for liberation and the need of unity in the struggle to achieve that liberation ...
... privilege. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Jivatman in the Integral Yoga The word “soul“, as also the word “psychic”, is used very vaguely and in many different senses in the English language. More often than not in ordinary parlance no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire—the false soul or ...
... in quality and quantity Savitri must be counted as remarkable even among the world's remarkable achievements. Page 150 With its 23,813 lines, 1 it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 to the place of runner-up: in fact it is the longest in any European language old or new, with the exception of Nicos Kazantzakis's ...
... II "On Quantitative Metre", pp. 340-41. Page 304 "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 ...
... Our democratic inspira-tion, our desire to be free from British Rule drew strength from the same source — England — from which hailed the Imperialism that held us subject. With the growth of the English language in India there grew in Indian minds the liberalism of English political thought. It is Wordsworth who opens a sonnet with the thrilling phrase: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue ...
... a correct argument: besides, the conclusion though logically fallacious is not psychologically quite absurd. Now Barnes replaces "syllogism" by "a redeship of three thought-puttings". The English language does not appear to gain much by this kind of roundabout awkwardness. But the pairing of a Latin with an Anglo-Saxon word is not the only happy result of the two ele-ments. Sometimes a number of ...
... Watters, T., Hiuen Tsang (London, 1904-05) Weber, A., A History of Indian Literature, 2nd Ed., (London, 1882) Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1955 Page 619 Whithead, R. B., In Numismatic Chronicle, Sixth Chronicle, Sixth Series, III Wilson, H. H., The Vishnu Purāna: A System of Hindu Mythology ...
... publishing. I replied that I would never publish it without letting you have your say as well. If somebody finances the venture, do I have your permission to bring out another collection like The English Language and the Indian Spirit? It would start with the very first letter you wrote to me on receiving a copy of that book - at the beginning of last year. We went on to discuss Yeats and the subject ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry Introduction The Collection of letters - The English Language and the Indian Spirit - preceding the present one was appreciated by "an audience fit though few" interested in the adventure of India's contribution to the varied world of English poetry. This audience is expected to welcome the cut and thrust of two idealistic ...
... as his political idealism, his intellectual power and his towering spiritual attainment. Born in India on August 15,1872, but educated from his early boyhood in England and speaking the English language as if it were his mother-tongue, he was already at nineteen an unmistakable poet, writing in a vein which is little short of remarkable, considering that only a few even among English singers ...
... Sethna saw them, then little of the originality is apparent even now! Colonised, we are still debating the question of Indian nationalism, the meaning of national pride, the significance of the English language and the essential truths behind Hinduism. We are still confused about revivalism and secularism, the spiritual life and world crisis, the legacy of Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi for nation ...
... plane taken up into the Aurobindo-nian universe. And throughout there is the right rhythm, the soul of the Greek quantitative hexameter has been caught without sacrificing the stress-genius of the English language. Page 377 ...
... too of the world in its entirety - these are Hinduism's natural modes of being. And if these modes are not to be vitiated it is necessary to consider as a vital portion of our national life the English language. We may regard Hindi with a fostering care, we may try to spread it more and more, but let us not commit the blunder of attempting to cut out or atrophy what is now a natural organ of our culture-body ...
... double aspect of the poetic phenomenon — and particularly of a super-phenomenon like Savitri — will differ from reader to reader, depending on the inner sensitivity and on the intimacy with the English language. But all readers will receive the maximum they can by reciting Savitri instead of simply running the eye over the page. As for the "how" and "where" of poetry becoming yoga and yoga poetry ...
... Can't accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me. The poetical examples ...
... Alwar's poetry; but it has suffered considerably in the translation, — indeed the genius of the Tamil tongue hardly permits of an effective rendering, so utterly divergent is it from that of the English language. Sri Aurobindo, The Hour of God, SABCL Vol. 17 * The form of the question reminds one of Epictetus'definition of man, 'Thou art a little soul carrying about a corpse." Some of ...
... you land yourself in pure license and there is no reason why you should not scan "Īllu/mīned by/ thoūsănd/ rēsplĕn/dēnt suns"/ and make a trochaic line of it. You cannot ignore stresses in the English language. I really cannot see how you find iambic rhythm in "Pervading the spaces a profound Presence I feel". If there is any rhythm, it is the rhythm of free verse not of any fixed metre. You have ...
... band of gifted poets here. Perhaps he is paying a compliment to himself! (Laughter) NIRODBARAN: He says one must know English prose in order to write English poetry. SRI AUROBINDO: The English language rather. ...
... and lifeless and gives the impression that they have learned English. A good writer will always avoid stock expressions and vary the usages. (Smiling) Stephen Phillips, the poet, said that the English language is like a woman who will only love if you take liberties with her. (Laughter. After a pause) Sir Dinshaw Wacha sent a book here he had written. I found on every page almost forty stock phrases—what ...
... of which he occupies a place of high eminence. He never made any serious attempt to write poetry in English as his knowledge of English metre is almost negligible and his familiarity with the English language is neither deep nor extensive… These poems have a value to those who are interested in the process of poetic creation in as much as whatever poetic merit they have is solely due to the poet’s ...
... who, then you are a no doubt!" I am sure the squabblers understood each other and we can also intuit the drift of their squabble. Perhaps some day these delicious Indianisms will get into the English Language." 46 Case 4: 'Irish bull: This is the case of the right use of the words to convey the right sense but somehow if the words are scanned too literally for their meanings, the new ...
... yearnings and anxieties. We witness here the contemporary living history. Let us also mention here that this great poem comes to us in the royal garment of hexameter in the contemporary English language. Sri Aurobindo had suggested in his essay On Quantitative Metre that "The Hexameter, half a dozen of the greater or more beautiful lyrical forms and the freedom of Page 53 the ...
... Argument for the existence of God) Tutor (1): Arguably, concepts are linguistic entities, not psychological ones. It would be more correct to say that it is a linguistic fact that in the English language there is a concept marked by the word 'God'. Page 86 Chitwan (2): I disagree. It is not merely a linguistic fact since even linguistics has a certain basis in psychology. Without ...
... reforms. Many a factor contributed to these changes but the most important was the impact of the new ideas and forces from the West as a result of the growth of education and the spread of the English language. At first there was a good deal of blind acceptance and servile imitation of western life but soon a number of powerful thinkers started examining their own ancient heritage in the light of the ...
... "woven-incense". Hopkinsese is the language of Hopkins—quite a famous poet now in spite of your not having heard of him—a fore-runner of present day poetry. He tried to do new things with the English language. A Catholic poet like Francis Thompson. What's Bedlamic, please? Never heard of him, I'm sure! Bedlam is or was the principal lunatic asylum in England. You have never heard the expression ...
... Sarkar, when he used to go on secret work in cognito, would relate with tears how Mrinalini used to dress him with Sri Aurobindo's suits. Page 18 "She had a strong attraction for the English language and wanted to improve her knowledge of it. With this object she began to coach me which was a great blessing indeed to me. She used to correct our pronunciation, and teach us how to read and ...
... eye a very attractive and original effect. I have grave doubts about the success of the orientals in the field of English poetry. It is very difficult for us to enter into the subtleties of English language; and our oriental nature is also unappealing to the Westerners. What you say is no doubt correct, but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international ...
... my table." 91 (Laughter) You see what a compact expression: he said so many things in one single word! But don't you think that we Indians have a better pronunciation and command of the English language - we are no better. I gave you long, long ago an example cited by Sri Aurobindo Himself in one of the Majlis 92 meetings. A Punjabi said, "We are all liars." What he meant was "lawyers." Sri ...
... the way, you didn't understand me. I didn't mean that you damned my poems, but my metres or rather my innovations in metres. Oh that! Of course. Your irregulars were very rough with the poor English language. As for Romen, I understand he simply hooks on to the source and lets it tumble through him. That explains his success: যোগঃ কর্ম্মসু কৌশলং 131 —যোগ = joining on, hooking on. Charcoal given ...
... to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. You must not imagine that as soon as Helen grasped the idea that everything had a name she at once became mistress of the treasury of the English language, or that "her mental faculties emerged, full armed, from their then living tomb, as Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus," as one other enthusiastic admirers would have us believe. At first, the ...
... However, he became totally disillusioned with the film world and left Bombay to become very active on the problem of a national language. He felt that India would never be free as long as the English language dominated, and he toured the country promoting Hindi. He dreamed of a national literature of India, and his journal, Hamsa, became the organ of an all-India organization to promote this cause ...
... fervour Page 289 and spiritual upheaval. He was a voracious reader, and studied history, mathematics, logic, psychology, and philosophy. He also made great efforts to master the English language. His favourite subject was history and he made a detailed study of the modern European nations. His studies were not limited to the university curriculum. By himself he acquired a thorough grasp ...
... poets like Whitman, Meredith, Carpenter, A.E. and Tagore, that language, too, may turn to the discovery of mantric poetry and even the expression of that poetry through the vehicle of the English language. It is also remarkable that Sri Aurobindo himself wrote his great epic savitri, which is the longest poem in English literature, to embody and to give full expression to mantric poetry ...
... foot. But the English metrical scheme has been influenced a great deal by the French language with its Latin tradition. Indeed, the Norman-French influence has been powerfully dominating the English language for several centuries. This has considerably helped English prosody gain in variety and richness, for here there is room for both the main lines of rhythmic expression. Metrical forms where ...
... sense; so, he allowed his disciples great liberty. Being himself a product of this age he knew too well the intellectual doubts that beset the mind. His European training and mastery of the English language gave him the necessary background to deal with intellectual doubts. Another reason of his giving the latitude to the intellectual doubts was bis great compassion. He felt pity for man whose ...
... Today the result is that Englishmen can no longer claim English as the exclusive language of British Islanders. In the words of an eminent Englishman, Ronald Nixon, alias, Sri Krishna Prem, "The English language has been given to the world and its usages and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the Islanders whose tongue it originally was. Those who would remain sole rulers ...
... of keeping late hours for reading and writing poetry, Aurobindo used to rise slightly late in the morning. He wrote English poetry in various metres. He had an extraordinary command of the English language. His English poems were sweet and simple, his descriptions lucid and devoid of over-colouring. He possessed an uncommon felicity of expression, and never misused a single word. He wrote his ...
... complain that they do not understand Cubism. But Cubism is based upon other paintings. What does it matter if people do not understand it? I don't know English, but that does not mean that the English language does not exist. I do not understand it, it is nobody's fault." 7.I don't believe in the envolution of the artist. I don't believe that there is past and future in art. The art that is ...
... described by S.K. Maitra as the last arch in "The bridge of thoughts and sighs which spans the history of Aryan culture"; not only is Sri Aurobindo's Savitri "probably the greatest epic in the English language" (as Raymond F. Piper has described it); Sri Aurobindo was also the perfervid prophet of Indian nationalism, and a great patriot, a great thinker, and a great Yogi, a versatile poet and dramatist ...
... Bepin Babu and were supported by the Mullicks. " The editorial staff comprised Bepin C. Pal , Sri Aurobindo, Shyam Sundar Chakrabarty! and Bejoy Chandra Chatterji , both of them 'masters of the English language,' and Hemendra Prasad Chose. The dissension between Bepin Pal and others arose because of differences of political views "especially with regard to the secret revolutionary action with which ...
... most considerable genius a highly intellectual people has produced, yet left nothing to which the world will return with unfailing delight. Telang, it is true, worked mainly in English, a language he had learned; and in a language you have learned, you may write graciously, correctly, pleasingly, but you will never attain to the full stature of your genius. But it was a yet more radical mistake that he... lawyer, critic, official, philologian and religious innovator,—the whole world seemed to be shut up in his single brain. At first sight he looks like a bundle of contradictions. He had a genius for language and a gift for law; he could write good official papers and he could write a matchless prose; he could pass examinations and he could root out an organised tyranny; he could concern himself with the ...
... fluent equally in Sanskrit and French (besides other languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, English) - in fact, every student studies both French and Sanskrit and the mother tongue from his very first years in the school. Maths and science are taught in French and other subjects in English; languages are taught in their own respective language. It is no surprise to come across a dhoti-attired ...
... short to the ear, but long by stylisation. The classical languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) are perfectly logical, coherent and consistent in the matter of quantity; they had to be because quantity was the very life of their rhythm and they could not treat longs as shorts and shorts as longs as it is done, at every step, in English. Modern languages can do that because their rhythm rests on intonation... basis of the rhythmic structure. In English you can write pretending that "road" is short and "runs" is long, or —where the sound corresponding to Sanskrit ए or that corresponding to Sanskrit ओ is made short or long at pleasure; but to the Sanskrit, Greek or Latin ear it would have sounded like a defiance of the laws of Nature. Bengali is a modern language, so there this kind of stylisation... that an English iambic metre or any other with a Greek name is the same as a Latin or Greek metre with that name—an equivoque based on the fiction that a stressed and an unstressed English syllable are Page 152 quantitatively long and short. There is a certain kind of general equivalence, but a fundamental difference—as those who have tried to find an equivalent in the English stress system ...
... and submitted to its winning influence. But before him there was a tremendous problem: How could this influence be assimilated in English, a language so different from Sanskrit? Already in translating Kalidasa he had met with this problem. "The diffuseness of English," he writes, "will not thus lend itself to the brief suggestiveness of the Sanskrit without being so high-strung, nervous and bare... wideness, complexity and power of his poetic mind. In the case of Sri Aurobindo the influence is conscious. Before his return to India he had already been writing poetry in English, influenced and inspired by English poets, and nourished by both the classical and modem literatures of Europe. In India he discovered the great Sanskrit literature which till then had remained virtually unknown to... in an English quatrain of iambic pentameter. In his translations Sri Aurobindo does not hesitate to use more lines whenever he thinks it necessary. The important thing is the metrical mood and the metrical structure. Sanskrit epics are architectural. Their structure is made of verses which are like finely chiseled stones. 152 Sri Aurobindo's translation recreates the structure in English. I shall ...
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