... English literature: in French India the superstructure is French, it is the French language through which there has been communication and a common public life between the Bengalees, Tamils, Andhras and Malayalees who constitute the people of French India; we have been looking at the world outside through a study of the French language and French institutions and French literature. All this has made a difference;... of its own, political, administrative, judicial, educational, it has its own industries, its own labour legislation and other differentiating characteristics. There is also the impress of the French language and French culture. All Asiatic countries have been developing a mixed intellectuality, public life and social ideas; our life is Asiatic in its basis with a structure at the top adopted from Europe... free French India the present recognised institutions commercial, industrial and others will remain in vigour except in so far as they are legally modified by the Representative Assembly. The French language will continue as a means of communication between the different parts of French India and of discussion in the Assembly and of general administration. The educational system, the new University ...
... initiated." 62 (I suppose here he means what you meant about the limitedness of the French language?) Not only that—his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarmé's unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only. "His life-long endeavour to achieve an impossible ideal accounts for his... her mind has not made it. Is it really true that Mallarmé used to write with a set determination to make his works unintelligible? Can one really do it in that way? Certainly not. The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Also he refused to be satisfied with anything that was... language—how far one can do violence to the form of a language. It is a different question altogether. He says that Mallarmé adopted the path of arduous tapasyā , with language because the French language is too simple, clear and transparent etc., etc. And then he remarks that just as in spirituality simple ( sahaj ) sadhana leads to truth, so also in poetry simplicity leads to beauty. Would ...
... initiated." [p. 20] (I suppose here he means what you meant about the limitedness of the French language?) Not only that—his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarmé's unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only. "His life-long endeavour to achieve an impossible ideal accounts for his sterility... as fine as his language, images and mystic suggestions? Is it really true that he wrote with a set determination to make his works unintelligible? Page 380 Certainly not. The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Besides he refused to be satisfied with anything that ...
... strictness and bareness. But this may be considered a special quality of a branch line, as it were, of the French language and literature, as if it was an acquired capacity, the sign of a growth towards a greater possibility – but in regard to the other it may be said that what Racine is the French language and literature; their inherent quality is a spontaneous formation out of the inner soul of this great... style he created – here was a diversity, a plasticity, a suggestiveness, a magic all its own. There is some difference between the history of French literature and that of any other. First, the French language and literature have grown and matured not through a sudden change or a revolutionary transmutation – their growth and development are the result of a slow and steady process of evolution. In English ...
... clear, rational and unambiguous, you must go to French. French is the language par excellence of law and logic. Mental presentation, as neat and transparent as possibly can be is the special aid French language brings to you. But precisely because it is intellectually so clear, and neat, it has often to avoid or leave out certain shades and nuances or even themes which do not go easily into its logical... external influences; they have benefited by their wide contact with other peoples and races and cultures. The stamp of mental clarity and neat psychological or introspective analysis in the French language has been its asset and a characteristic capacity from the time of Descartes - through Malebranche and Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists - right down to Bergson. The English are not by nature me... it in contact with the inner (even though 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 ...
... Sri Aurobindo or herself and started commenting on it. Questions from her audience popped up frequently, for they were free to ask anything they wanted – as long as their questions were in the French language, for these were after all French classes. At first the classes were intended for a group of six girls whom the Mother met regularly ‘in the small children’s courtyard of the Guest House, under... being exists only on the earth. × The Petit Robert (1993), an authoritative dictionary of the French language, explains the adjective physique as follows: 1. What relates to nature, to the concrete world; 2. What concerns the human body. ...
... world language being prepared somewhere—not here, somewhere. Sri Aurobindo used to say that frenchifying the English form improved it, while on the contrary, anglicizing the French language diminished it. The French language is clearer. But it's a bit rigid, it needs suppleness. ( silence ) I am not surprised they didn't take it [ The Great Sense ], it's a fighting work. It's for the youth ...
... recent origin, and of the new Parisian department stores such as La Samaritaine and Au Bon Marché, were worn and imitated wherever men, and especially women, dressed in the Western way. The French language was spoken in the upper circles of all European countries and used as the global diplomatic language. And although France had suffered a traumatic defeat at the hands of the new and threateningly... father’s library, some eight hundred or so. In that way her keen intelligence, so necessary for the great task awaiting her, developed and sharpened, and she acquired the stylistic mastery over the French language that she would show all through her life. The Early Sadhana 93 All this was part of Mirra’s life on the surface – verifiable facts of what people call the everyday life, there for anyone ...
... Yet from the seventeenth century until today audiences of all ages and walks of life have been able to identify with Moliere's world. The names of a number of his heroes have become part of the French language. To call someone a miser, a French speaker may say, "He is a Harpagon". A hypocrite can be called a "Tartuffe ". Page 179 Someone who has difficulties adjusting to the superficial... French military engineers, and French diplomatists but also French architects, painters, dramatists, and philosophers were the best in Europe, French fashions in dress dominated the Continent; the French language became the leading language of diplomacy and polite conversation, and the French court with its elaborate etiquette and ceremonial became the model for countless smaller courts throughout ...
... were visited by an uninterrupted stream of tourists, and the world expositions of 1889 (when the Eiffel Tower was built) and 1900 took place. Paris set the tone in manners and fashion, and the French language was still the lingua franca in Europe, spoken by the educated people and the diplomats of all countries. Mirra was born in a rather rich bourgeois family. Her brother would become Governor-General ...
... teaching the little ones and the adolescents, and if the adults found it interesting they too were welcome to join the class, for instance in the evening at the Playground. There the Mother gave French language lessons which soon turned into the Entretiens , a kind of didactic conversations; these conversations were recorded and written out afterwards, and would become her most widely read texts. ‘The ...
... often seems to deserve being spelt Misty Schism — Schism (pronounced Sizm) meaning in general a separation from the main body of a doctrine, especially a religious doctrine. The nature of the French language is ever a check against becoming involuted in idea and expression and construction. Thus Mallarme was forced, by the very medium in which he worked, to produce with each poem a systematic whole ...
... luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy — one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression — the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is the difference ...
... luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy -one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression - the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is the ...
... destroyed the ghettos, he gave Jews freedom of worship and the right to own land and practice trades.” 385 All this happened at the time of dominance of the French culture and its vehicle, the French language. The political and cultural reaction against this “Welsh” imperialism grew vehement and became an important step in the evolution of the German self-consciousness. “The German wave of liberation ...
... luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy—one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarmé's wrestlings with the French language to find the symbolic expression—the right turn of speech for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is ...
... expressing things—it does not matter whether others have written the same things and done it better. What you should aim at is simply to learn to write French perfectly, to get full use of the French language as an instrument. If the Force wants to express anything through you hereafter or not, is a thing you should leave to the Divine Will; once you give yourself into its hands in the true consciousness ...
... another falsehood), and the moral sense, which is yet another falsehood! (Mother laughs) So.... (silence) Page 191 March 28, 1970 AM XI-134-135 The French language is very literary and mental, isn't it? Yes, it's very rigid. Rigid, yes. There's beginning to be a question of knowing what the language of Auroville will be. I have ...
... spontaneously: that is English, this is French—sometimes very different, sometimes very close. It was rather interesting, for you know that Sri Aurobindo was strongly drawn to the structure of the French language (he used to say that it created a far better, far clearer and far more forceful English than the Saxon structure), and often, while writing in English, he quite spontaneously used the French syntax ...
... peculiar essence is likely to be elusive unless we are studious to capture it. After the Merger in 1954, a local non-governmental association was formed in Pondicherry: the Friends of French Language and Culture. Also, with the willing co-operation of the India Government which had already accepted the continuance of French Colleges, France founded, with Dr. Filliozat, an eminent orientalist ...
... and rhythmical that we can't at first understand what they mean. This succession of syllables sets up thus an incongruity between the smooth flow of speech and the fact of unintelligibility. The French language lends itself especially to this sort of overrhythm. Examples: (i) "She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore" (ii) In French: "Didon dina dit-on du dos d'un dodu dindon." 23 3 ...
... which this Frenchman brought into play… “English lends itself far more easily to the ambiguous, so that English Mysticism often seems to deserve being spelt Misty Schism… The nature of the French language is ever a check against becoming involuted in idea and expression and construction. Thus Mallarme was forced, by the very medium in which he worked, to produce with each poem a systematic whole ...
... read the passage. I was reading it, everything in English, so I said "Rendaze vooze." The teacher asked, "What?" I said, "Rendaze vooze." He smiled and said, "No, ron-day-voo." So I cursed the French language! Why should you introduce all these words into any other tongue? There is no necessity for it. I came to love this word when I came to read Sri Aurobindo's "Pilgrim of the Night": "I made an ...
... Page 80 of the Romantic muse:— —"Et les heures s'évanouissent comme des rêves in-vécus..." 1 which possesses furthermore the magic of an indefinable mysticism so rare in the French language. The mystic element gives a special grace and flavour, a transcendent significance serving as an enveloping aura to the whole body of these Prayers and Meditations. One cannot, for example ...
... the milk and honey of the Romantic muse Et les heures s'evanouissent comme des rêves invécus. .¹ which possesses furthermore the magic of an indefinable mysticism so rare in the French language. The mystic element gives a special grace and flavour, a transcendent significance serving as an enveloping aura to the whole body of these Prayers and Meditations. One cannot, for example, ...
... simple and straight and transparent, less decorating and ambulating. There is in Bankim what is called decorum, restraint, stability and clarity, qualities of the classics; he reminds us of the French language – the French of Racine and Voltaire. In Rabindranath's nature and atmosphere we find the blossoming heart of the Romantics. That is why the manner of his expression is not so much simple arid straight ...
... to God for dappled things, a long accented vowel combines with three short unstressed ones to form a single 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 ...
... Mother replied. Thus began my French lessons from Mother. She would teach me one sentence each day. The following day I had to repeat it to her. Then began a really systematic study of the French language. It lasted for about two or three months. (15) When I first arrived in the Ashram, a football team had just been formed. Occasionally, this Ashram team used to play matches with teams ...
... Légende des siècle is epic in tone, in thought and movement. And yet it is not given its right place by the critics. It does not deal with a story but with episodes. That is the only epic in the French language. Disciple : Some maintain that as there is no story in Dante’s Divine Comedy it is not an epic. Sri Aurobindo : It is an epic. Paradise Lost has very little story and very few ...
... several scholarly books, one of which was on the history of Pondicherry. Mother appreciated it and asked her for one more copy for the Ashram Library. She admired Mother's mastery over the French language. She also mentioned that Mother did not like the rules of grammar to be broken. She was content with my progress in French. She remarked that my writing in French had got the French turn, and added ...
... takes up the French translation of the above quotation and spends a long time looking for a word for "right." Satprem reads out several unsatisfactory translations from a dictionary. ) The French language is very literary and mental, isn't it? Yes, it's very rigid. Rigid, yes. They're beginning to wonder what Auroville's language will be. I think it will be a language that will... ...
... ever-present Absence Mallarme breath-ed and moved. Hugo, besides being led away by his rhetorical tendency from the true mystic articulation, was still subject to the intellectualism inherent in the French language as developed through the centuries: Hugo at even his best had but sublimated by an imaginative and rhythmic process the spirit of prose. It is with men like Nerval and Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine ...
... difficult and repellent. He joins to a luminous clarity, lucidity and charm of expression an equal luminousness and just clarity of presentation and that perfect manner in both native to the Greek and French language and mind, but rare in the English tongue. In these seventeen pages he has presented the thought of the old enigmatic Ephesian with a clearness and sufficiency which leaves us charmed, enlightened ...
... France because of Julien Benda's book Belphegor where, turning its etymological significance (Baal-Peor, Semitic deity of licentiousness) to critical purposes, he has given a new adjective to the French language, Belph é gorien, to designate certain strains of degeneracy and effeminacy in the intellectual and social life of his country. The closing couplets of the two sonnets The Guest and The ...
... asked me if I would be interested. He asked the Mother about it and she said, “Yes, she can do it.” I had done my B.A. in French literature and had read many of the major French writers in the French language. I had also translated Mother’s Entretiens into English. Tehmi’s Painting Did you have many meetings with Satprem regarding the book? I had many meetings with Satprem, probably ...
... real creative innovator." Mallarmé turned the whole current of French poetry (one might say, of all modernist poetry) into a new channel, of which his poems were an opening.... The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech," says Sri Aurobindo. And Mallarmé prefers "to ...
... imagination to solve the difficulties which one has been unable to eliminate for lack of having sufficiently studied the laws of nature.” 22 What is here translated as ‘mind’ is esprit in the French language, which can mean ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ (and even ‘wit’). In Lamarck the first significance was out of the question. From a spark of the Divine the spirit or soul had been degraded to a rational, albeit ...
... because of Julien Benda's book Belphégor where, turning its etymological significance (Baal-Peor, Semitic deity of licentiousness) to critical purposes, he has given a new adjective to the French language, Belphégorien, to designate certain strains of degeneracy and effeminacy in the intellectual and social life of his country. * About the composition of all his poetry (and even ...
... I remembered Oscar Wilde. He does not exactly appear to be a writer coming naturally to the mind of an aspirant to spirituality. But, in the first place, we are in old French India, and in the French language the word "spiritual" — which is "spirituel" on French lips — most often means "intellectually sparkling". Oscar Wilde was surely that. And, in the second place, the memory of Wilde came to me in ...
... mutual sympathy in regard to musical matters, soon ripened into intimate friendship, and led to a close association with the encyclopaedists. He rapidly obtained a thorough knowledge of the French language, and acquired so perfectly the tone and sentiments of the society in which he moved that all marks of his foreign origin and training seemed effaced. In 1753 Grimm, following the example ...
... Can't you see her? There was a great burst of acclamations, and she sat down blushing, for it was not in her delicate nature to like being conspicuous. This speech and that episode about the French language scored two points against Brother Seguin, while he scored nothing against Joan; yet, sour man as he was, he was a manly man, and honest, as you can see by the histories; for at the Rehabilitation ...
... commended by Rabindranath Tagore himself four decades ago. His monograph on the Poet was published on the occasion of his last centenary in 1961. He is no inconsiderable a poet in the French language and he has been rendering into English almost all the talks and writings of The Mother from the original French. He is equally at home in English and in his mother-tongue Bengali; the latter he ...
... and honey of the Romantic muse— Et les heures s'evanouissent comme des reves invecus.. 1 which possesses furthermore the magic of an indefinable mysticism so rare in the French language. The mystic element gives a special grace and flavour, a transcendent significance serving as an enveloping aura to the whole body of these Prayers and Meditations. One cannot, for example ...
... pensant." Page 112 upon his inner consciousness and spiritual achievement, his power of expression, his literary style acquired by that a special quality which is his great gift to the French language. If one speaks of Pascal, one has to speak of his language also; for he was one of the great masters who created the French prose. His prose was a wonderful blend of clarity, precision, serried ...
... were recognised and commended by Rabindranath Tagore himself. His monograph on the Poet was published on the occasion of his birth centenary in 1961. He is no inconsiderable a poet in French language and has rendered into English almost all the talks and writings of the Mother from the original French. He was equally at home in English and in his mother-tongue Bengali; the latter he particularly ...
... was dominated by Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, Emile Zola, famed for his I accuse letter—to name but a few. They Page 21 enriched the French language so much that it became, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world's languages." The poet Charles Baudelaire was followed by Stéphane Mallar-me who was the ...
... anything a try. He was hungry for something ELSE. In Satprem, Mother found the stuff she could mould —a stuff honest enough to let itself be moulded. As it happened, he had a natural mastery over the French language. That gift served as a pretext; Mother started calling him in Pavitra's office in order to consult him. She would tell him things from the past or the present, events in her own life, to illustrate ...
... flood of questions here!" Pupils young and old, neophytes in Yoga, seasoned sadhaks: the Playground in the evening in the post-gymnastics mood of relaxation: the ostensible aim, learning the French language, extracts from spiritual writings, unpredictable questions oral or written: and the Mother herself the synoptic centre - such was the layout, such were the ingredients, such the central illuminating ...
... P.S. I remember a book (Hamer's? someone else's? I don't re member) in which the contrast was drawn between the English and French languages, that the English tongue tended to throw all the weight on the first or earliest possible syllable and slurred the others, the French did the opposite—so that when an Englishman pretends to say "strawberries", what he really says is "strawb's". That is the e... made nor developed in that way—if the English language were so to deprive itself of all beauty and by turning vision into vizn and then into vzn and all other words into similar horrors, I would hasten to abandon it for Sanskrit or French or Bengali—or even Swahili. P.S. By the way, one point. Does the Oxford pronounce in cold blood and so many set words that vision, passion (and by logical extension... unpronounceable. I remember in my French class at St. Paul's our teacher (a French man) insisted on our pronouncing ordre in the French way—in his mouth "orrdrr"; I was the only one who succeeded, the others all made it auder, orrder, audrer , or some such variation. There is the same difference of habit with words like "rhythm", and yet conventionally the French treatment is accepted so far as to ...
... the case of France whose language and literature are more a democratic and collective and less an individualistic creation, even there one single Name can be pointed out as the life and soul, the very cream of the characteristic poetic genius of the nation. I am, of course, referring to Racine, Racine who, in spite of Moliere and Corneille and Hugo, stands as the most representative French poet, the... embodiment of French resthesis par excellence. Such a great name is Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali literature. We need not forget Bankim Chandra, nor even Madhusudan: still one can safely declare that if Bengali language and literature belonged to any single person as its supreme liberator and fosterer savita and pusa – it is Rabindranath. It was he who lifted that language and literature ...
... S. I remember a book (Hamerton's? some one else's? I don't remember) in which the contrast was drawn between the English and French languages, that the English tongue tended to throw all the weight on the first or earliest possible syllable and slurred the others, the French did the opposite - so that when an Englishman pretends to say strawberries, what he really says is strawb's. That is the exaggeration... nor developed in that way - if the English language were so to Page 194 deprive itself of all beauty by turning vision into vizhn and then into vzhn and all other words into similar horrors, I would hasten to abandon it for Sanskrit or French or Bengali - or even Swahili. P.S. By the way, one point. Does the Oxford pronounce in cold blood and so many set words that vision, passion... you Scotchify the English language and make it char'r'r'm or vulgarise it and make it charrum - and even char'r'r'm is after all a monosyllable. Prism, the ism in Socialism and pessimism, rhythm can be made dissylabic; but by convention (convention has nothing to do with these things) the ism, rhythm are treated as a single syllable, because of the etymology.... The French pronounce rhythme reethm. ...
... learned French (English was his "mother tongue") and discovered a spontaneous affinity for France: There was an attachment to English and European thought and literature, but not to England as a country; I had no ties there.... If there was attachment to a European land as a second country, it was intellectually and emotionally to one not seen or lived in in this life, not England, but France. 5 ... inseparable; this consciousness is power, an active vision. Often, when Sri Aurobindo and Mother tried to describe their experience, their remarks would echo one another in English and in French: Another language would be needed, une autre langue. The Supramental Vision The supramental vision is a global vision. The mind dissects little fragments and opposes them to one another. The overmind... when we explore the earth. Then we learn to understand the meaning of our experiences; this is a foreign language, even several languages, which we must decipher without any interference from our own mental language. Indeed, one of the main difficulties is that mental language is the only language we know, so as we wake up, its own transcriptions will tend unconsciously to interfere with and to distort ...
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