Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 219
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
March 16, 1932
I have read your last and also your positively last translations for your book Anāmī. By coincidence I have given today my last and positively last hammerings to get out from myself the letter about Krishnaprem’s letters and you will have the result, I suppose, some time tomorrow.
Your translations are very good, but much more poetic than the originals: some would consider that a fault, but I do not. The songs of these Bhaktas (Kabir and others) are very much in a manner and style that might be called the “hieratic primitive,” like a picture all in intense lines, but only two or three essential lines at a time; the only colour is the hue of a single and very simple strong spiritual idea or emotion or experience. The Urdu poems are still more so. It is hardly possible to carry that over into modern poetry; the result would probably be instead of the bare sincerity of the original some kind of ostensible artificial artlessness that would not be at all the same thing.
I have no objection to your substituting Krishna for Ram, and if Kabir makes any, which is not likely, you have only to sing to him softly, “Rām Shyām judā mat karo bhai,” [Don’t separate Rām and Shyām, O brother] and he will be silenced at once.
The bottom reason for the preference of Krishna or Rama is not sectarian but psychological. The Northerner prefers Rama because the Northerner is the mental, moral and social man in his type, and Rama is a congenial Avatar for that type; the Bengali, emotional and intuitive, finds all that very dry and plumps for Krishna. I suspect that is the whole mystery of the choice. Apart from these temperamental 
preferences and turning to essentials, one might say that Rama is the Divine accepting and glorifying a mould of the human mental, while Krishna seems rather to break the human moulds in order to create others from the higher planes; for he comes down direct from the Overmind and hammers with its forces on the mind and vital and heart of man to change and liberate and divinise them. At least that is one way of looking at their difference.
By the way, why should the joy of creation be unyogic? Every creator feels the joy of creation – including the Divine Creator.
The music is not on the 28th – it is on the 27th, Easter Sunday.