Correspondence 1934, June (I)

June 1934

It is gratifying that Anilkumar should rank me with Ramakrishna and Chaitanya, but however gratified I may be, I cannot help saying that his remark takes the first prize for absurdity and ignorance. As if thousands of Yogis, saints and mystics had not realised God and only three people had done it! Why do people go out of their way to make such silly pronouncements, I wonder! But perhaps it was merely a rhetorical flourish or rather a way of hinting that although Sri Aurobindo may have had some realisation (perhaps) of the Divine, he was unable to communicate anything of it to anybody else. I had thought differently, but that must have been an imagination of my ego — for Anilkumar surely must know — and also the Doctor.

Saurin’s omniscience, so far as it is true, announces nothing new — I suppose his omniscience simply amounts to the hearing of much gossip perhaps through the channel of the Doctor. The Doctor’s sexuality, domesticity, love of bourgeois comfort are as ancient as Methuselah — they took him away from here once in chase of these vital satisfactions, but he found them not so satisfactory after all and fled to some mountain, found the mountain also deficient and pleaded for several years to come back to this detestable and uncomfortable Ashram. The only new news in Saurin’s lot is that he proposes to go for good — his own version is that he is coming back in August as early as possible and is leaving his worldly goods here in the meantime. However Saurin may know his mind better, as they are intimate.

About the depressions, the first question is whether they are the temporary depressions which everyone almost has on the way or are they, as you seem to suggest, an increasing and in a way depletive thing, a good bye to hope and sadhana. It is quite possible that there is a wide-spread attempt to press depression on the sadhaks, for depression is the obstacle natural to this stage of the struggle with the subconscient Ignorance out of which the external human nature is a formation and the roots of its unwillingness to change are there. But you speak of the depression as if it were not only definitive and absolute but universal (“the other sadhaks”). If so, a retreat to Kashmir in the wake of Anilkumar would be imperative. Kashmir is a magnificent place, its rivers unforgettable and on one of its mountains with a shrine of Shankaracharya on it I got my second realisation of the Infinite (long before I started Yoga). But I seem to know that a few at least of the sadhaks are making a progress with which they are well satisfied, that some have what appears to them a concrete realisation and others have experiences which are leading them forward and do not complain because they have not yet the one definitive thing. And their number seems to me to increase rather than decrease. Even those who grumble, some of them, do not seem inclined to take their flight to other climes, but, after delivering their souls by a good grumble, return to the endeavour at Yoga. As long as it is so, I see no necessity for a débandade [headlong flight].

I am rather astonished at your finding Wordsworth’s realisation, however mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or dictated by emotional effervescence. Wordsworth was hardly an emotional or effervescent character. As for an abstract realisation, it sounds like a round square; I have never had one myself and find it difficult to believe in it. But certainly a realisation in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or more vivid. Still, Wordsworth’s did not make that impression on me and to him it certainly came as something positive, powerful and determinative. He stayed there and went no farther, did not get to the source, because more was hardly possible in his time and surroundings, at least to a man of his mainly moral and intellectual temper.

In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes the thing realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness than any physical thing can be. Such a realisation of the personal Divine or of the impersonal Brahman or of the self does not usually come at the beginning of a sadhana or in the first years or for many years. It comes so to a very few; mine came fifteen years after my first pre-Yogic experience in London and in the fifth year after I started Yoga. That I consider extraordinary quick, an express train speed almost — though there may no doubt have been several quicker achievements. But to expect and demand it so soon and get fed up because it does not come and declare Yoga impossible except for two or three in the ages would betoken in the eyes of any experienced Yogi or sadhak a rather rash and abnormal impatience. Most would say that a slow development is the best one can hope for in the first years and only when the nature is ready and fully concentrated towards the Divine can the definitive experience come. To some rapid preparatory experiences can come at a comparatively early stage, but even they cannot escape the labour of the consciousness which will make these experiences culminate in the realisation that is enduring and complete. It is not a question of my liking or disliking your demand or attitude. It is a matter of fact and truth and experience, not of liking or disliking, two things which do not usually sway me. It is the fact that people who are grateful and cheerful and ready to go step by step, even by slow steps, if need be, do actually march faster and more surely than those who are impatient and in haste and at each step despair or [murmur?]. It is what I have always seen — there may be instances to the contrary and I have no objection to your being one — none at all. I only say that if you could maintain “hope and fervour and faith,” there could be a much bigger chance, that is all.

This is just a personal explanation — a long explanation but which seemed to be called for by your enhancement of my glory — and it is dictated by a hope that after all in the long run an accumulation of explanations may persuade you to prefer the sunny path to the grey one, the one thing wanted is that you should push through and arrive.

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June 1934?

(About Nishikanta’s translation of Sri Aurobindo’s poem “Nirvana”.)

(…) Nishikanta’s version.

I think you will find the translation fairly good, but I am far from satisfied myself. Not that it isn’t Bengali or poetical, but it has no resilience, it has no force, sounds too much like a string of words aesthetically built up without any real vivid urge.

Your “Nirvana” breathes an atmosphere so wonderful of calm and peace and realisation. But [who?] can expect that of course de n’importe qui [from just anybody]?

I fear it is not successful — your criticism is quite correct— it is the life that is absent. The octet can pass; but the sextet fails completely.

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June 3, 1934

Your translation of “Shiva” is a very beautiful poem, combining strength and elegance in the Virgilian manner. I have put one or two questions relating to the correctness of certain passages as a translation, but except for the care for exactitude it has not much importance.

Anilbaran’s translation pleased me on another ground—he has rendered with great fidelity and, as it seemed to me, with considerable directness, precision and force the thought and spiritual substance of the poem—he has rendered, of course in more mental terms than mine, exactly what I wanted to say. What might be called the “mysticity” of the poem, the expression of spiritual vision in half-occult, half-revealing symbols is not successfully caught, but that is a thing which may very well be untranslatable; it depends on an imponderable element which can hardly help escaping or evaporating in the process of transportation from one language to another. What he has done seems to me very well done. Questions of diction or elegance are another matter.

There remains Nishikanta’s two translations of “Jivanmukta.” I do not find the mātrā-vṛtta[1] one altogether satisfactory, but the other is a very good poem. But as a translation! Well, there are some errors of the sense which do not help, e.g., mahimā for splendour; splendour is light. Silence, Light, Power, Ananda, these are the four pillars of the Jīvanmukta[2] consciousness. So too the all-seeing, flame-covered eye gets transmogrified into something else; but the worst is the divine stillness surrounding the world which is not at all what I either said or meant. The lines:

Revealed it wakens, when God’s stillness
Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature,

express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and itself rendered calm and motionless by that over-vaulting influence. Nothing of that appears in the translation; it is a vague mental statement with an ornamental metaphor.

I do not stress all that to find fault, but because it points to a difficulty which seems to me insuperable. This “Jivanmukta” is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy. If one writes only ideas about what it is or should be, there is failure. There must be something concrete, the form, the essential spiritual emotion of the state. The words chosen must be the right words in their proper place and each part of the statement in its place in an inevitable whole. Verbiage, flourishes there must be none. But how can all that be turned over into another language without upsetting the applecart? I don’t see how it can be easily avoided. For instance in the fourth stanza, “Possesses,” “sealing,” “grasp” are words of great importance for the sense. The feeling of possession by the Ananda rapture, the pressure of the ecstatic force sealing the love so that there can never again be division between the lover and the All-Beloved, the sense of the grasp of the All-Beautiful are things more than physically concrete to the experience (“grasp” is especially used because it is a violent, abrupt, physical word — it cannot be replaced by “In the hands” or “In the hold”) and all that must have an adequate equivalent in the translation. But reading Nishikanta’s Bengali line I no longer know where I am, unless perhaps in a world of Vedantic abstractions where I never intended to go. So again what has Nishikanta’s translation of my line to do with the tremendous and beautiful experience of being ravished, thoughtless and wordless, into the breast of the Eternal who is the All-Beautiful, All-Beloved?

That is what I meant when I wrote yesterday about the impossibility — and also what I apprehended when I qualified my assent to Nolini’s proposal with a condition.[3]

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[1] mātrā-vṛtta: system of metrical measure depending on differentiating alphabetical letters into long and short. A mātrā is a prosodial or syllabic instant, the time required to pronounce a short vowel.

[2] Jīvanmukta: a living liberated being.

[3] We do not know what was Sri Aurobindo’s “condition”. But Nolini’s proposal was to translate Sri Aurobindo’s Six Poems into Bengali, and offer them to him in a small printed booklet. The translators were: Anilbaran Roy (“Shiva”), Behari Barua (“Jivanmukta”), Dilip (“Trance”), Moni (“The Life Heavens”), Nolini (“The Bird of Fire”) and Sahana (“In Horis Aeternum”).