Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 290

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

November 4, 1932

A new birth to fearless equanimity – it is a very good idea. Why so much nervousness about a wrung neck – a neck wrung by Shiva ought afterwards to be as strong as the neck of Atlas or even of Sheshnaga [the king of snakes].

I am reading your printed poems and notice the devilries of the printer. There is one in the English translation – for I stood aghast before a “hand of empty dreams” – and this singular hand was plural! It took me a minute to discover that the Devil’s own had turned a collective band into a plural hand. “A hand of empty dreams” – how gloriously poetic and modernistically full of a meaningless significance!

The Mother says that, if you want, you can come to her for a short time tomorrow morning at 9.15 (Saturday).

P.S. Of course, Prabodh Sen is right. I suppose what Buddhadev means is that none of the very great poets invented a metre – they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other people’s rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from whoever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace? They did a good deal of inventing or of transferring – introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can’t spot a precedent in modern European literature but there must be some. And after all, hang precedents! A good thing – I mean, combining metre invention with perfect poetry – would be still a good thing to do even if no one had had the good sense to do it before.