Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21039

Your translation of Shelley’s poem is vulnerable in the head and the tail. In the head, because it seems to me that your words are open to the construction that human love is a rich and precious thing which the poet in question unfortunately does not possess and it is only because of this deplorable poverty that he offers the psychic devotion, less warm and rich and desirable, but still in its own way rare and valuable! I exaggerate perhaps, but, as your lines are open to a meaning of this kind, it tends to convey the very reverse of Shelley’s intended significance. For in English “What men call love” is strongly depreciatory and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says in substance: “Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I cannot offer to you. But there is a greater thing, a true psychic love, all worship and devotion, which men do not readily value, being led away by the vital glamour, but which the Heavens do not reject though it is offered from something so far below them, so maimed and ignorant and sorrow-vexed as the human consciousness which is to the divine consciousness as the moth is to the star, as the night is to the day. And will you not accept this from me, you, who in your nature are kin to the Heavens, you, who seem to me to have something of the divine nature, to be something’ bright and happy and pure far above the sphere of our sorrow?” Of course all that is not said but Only suggested, but it is obviously the spirit of the poem,– and it is this spirit in it that made me write to A the other day that it would be perhaps impossible to find in English literature a more perfect example of psychic inspiration than these eight lines you have translated.... As to the tail, I doubt whether your last line brings out the sense of “something afar from the sphere of our sorrow”. If I make these criticisms at all, it is because you have accustomed me to find in you a power of rendering the spirit and sense of your original while turning it into fine poetry in its new tongue which I would not expect or exact from any other translator.