Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Indians and the Writing of English Poetry

Let me tell you how an Englishman named T visiting our Ashram looked at our versification in English. His tongue has poured cold water over our enthusiasm. He had a heated discussion with D and said he could not understand at all why we Easterners should write poetry in English, deserting our own languages.

Is his understanding of such immense importance? I might just as reasonably ask him why Westerners like him should go to practise an Eastern thing like spirituality or Yoga, leaving their own parliaments, factories and what not. But not being T in intelligence I don't ask such absurd questions.

He seems to know definitely that we shan't be able to handle English as an Englishman would.

A T, like his father Tom, also his uncles Dick and Harry, must of course be omniscient.

He says: “Suppose an Englishman were to write in Bengali!”

It would depend on the Englishman and how he did it.

D argued: “The Gitanjali of Tagore was appreciated by many English poets. Conrad's prose ranks as high as any great English writer's. Sarojini Naidu and some others were praised by Gosse, Binyon and de la Mare.”

Add Santayana whose prose is better than most Englishmen's.

T rejoined: “The interests of those praisers were extra-literary. Show the works of the Indians to people like Eliot and see.” God knows what he means.

I don't think God knows. What the blazes does all this nonsense mean?... People like Binyon and de la Mare have no literary merit or literary perception and Eliot has? Eliot is a theorist, a man who builds his poetry according to rule. God save us from such people and their opinions.¹

As for Tagore, his work is said to have been appreciated because it was derivative, a rendering from another language.

What difference does that make? The English Bible is a translation, but it ranks among the finest pieces of literature in the world.

As for Conrad, T says he is a Westerner, and surely there is a bigger difference in tradition, expression, feeling between an Easterner and an Englishman than between a Westerner and a Westerner.

In other words, any Western tradition, expression, feeling – even Polish or Russian – can be legitimately expressed in English, however un-English it may be, but an Eastern spirit, tradition or temper cannot? He differs from Gosse who told Sarojini Naidu that she must write Indian poems in English – poems with an Indian tradition, feeling, way of expression, not reproduce the English mind and turn, if she wanted to do something great and original as a poet in the English tongue.

T objects to our making even an experiment.

How terrible! Then of course everybody must stop at once. I too must not presume to write in English – for I have an Indian mind and spirit and am that dreadful Indian thing, a Yogi.

Can we say that he is absolutely wrong?

Nobody ever is absolutely wrong. There is an infinitesimal atom of truth even in the most lunatic proposition ever made.

We Indians can't enter into the subtleties of a foreign tongue; so we run the risk of writing unEnglish English.

Who is this “we”? Many Indians write better English than many educated Englishmen.

I believe he would waive his objection in your case.

How graciously kind of him! After all perhaps I can continue to write in English. Only poor Amal will have to stop. He can't write a line after the cold water of T's tongue.

I don't know that any Englishman could write pucca Bengali. It would sound and “sense” unBengali Bengali.

It would if he had not thoroughly mastered the Bengali tongue. It is true that few Englishmen have the Indian's linguistic turn, plasticity and ability.

Of course if you say that our aim is not success or Shelleyan heights, then it is a different matter.

Shelleyan heights are regarded, I believe, by Eliot as very low things or at least a very bad eminence.

But even for expressing spirituality, must we not try to make the vehicle as perfect as possible?

Who said not except the unparalleled T?

Now, is there any chance for it? T, an Englishman, says “None”. And you?

How can my opinion have any value against that of an Englishman – especially when that Englishman calls himself T?

As I said at the beginning I have no interest in T's opinions and set no value by them. Even the awful fact of his being an Englishman does not terrify me. Strange, isn't it? I have seen some lucubrations of his meant to be spiritual or Yogic and they are the most horrible pretentious inflated circumlocutionary bombastic would-be-abysmally-profound language that I have seen. For a man who talks of English style, tradition, expression, feeling, idiom it was the worst production and most unEnglish possible. Few Indians could have beaten it. And the meaning nil. Also he is the gentleman who finds that there is “very little spirituality” in India. So hats off to T (even though we have no hats), and for the rest silence.

As for the question itself, I put forward four reasons why the experiment could be made. 1) The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially Indians. 2) We are entering an age when the stiff barriers of insular and national mentality are breaking down (Hitler notwithstanding), the nations are being drawn  into a common universality with whatever differences, and in the new age there is no reason why the English should not admit the expression of other minds than the English in their tongue. 3) For ordinary minds it may be difficult to get over the barrier of a foreign tongue but extraordinary minds, Conrad etc., can do it. 4) In this case the experiment is to see whether what extraordinary minds can do cannot be done by Yoga. Sitfficit – or, as R eloquently puts it, “ 'Nuff said”.

27.02.1936

¹ Sri Aurobindo's whole estimate of Eliot is naturally not summed up in a remark made in 1936. Although this remark touches on a point which he evidently thought important in relation to Eliot, he could say about some passages read out to him at a later date: “This is poetry.” About some others he said, “The substance is good but there's no poetry.” He also appreciated certain pieces of criticism by Eliot, apropos of which he remarked that Eliot was better as a critic than as a poet.

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