Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

13 December 1939

Sri Aurobindo (hearing laughter): What is the matter?

Nirodbaran: Purani and Champaklal are laughing together.

Sri Aurobindo: That is their usual business.

Champaklal: Purani has hurt his big toe again.

Purani: A plank fell on it.

Sri Aurobindo: You are always knocking against something or pushing it over. (Laughter)

At this moment, Nirodbaran, by inattention, happened to spill some water from a bowl.

Sri Aurobindo (laughing): What’s the matter now? You are doing the same thing as Purani along your own line.

Nirodbaran (as Sri Aurobindo started reclining): In the New Statesman a reviewer quotes a line of Turner’s poetry as an example of “careless and lazy inversion”. The line is:

When the last tune is played and void the hall.

Sri Aurobindo: The inversion is rather deliberate. It’s there for the sake of emphasis.

Nirodbaran: I don’t understand why the reviewer calls it “careless”.

Sri Aurobindo: It’s certainly not careless. If he doesn’t like it, he can say so, but he can’t attribute it to carelessness. Who is the reviewer?

Nirodbaran: He is another poet, Richard Church.

Sri Aurobindo: Oh, these are all fads of different poets!

Nirodbaran: In the review Church says that Yeats was very enthusiastic over Turner’s poetry. In his adventure through modern poetry he has made a discovery, Yeats says.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, in rhymed verse Turner writes very well at times. But his prose-poetry comes to nothing.

Nirodbaran: Turner seems to be a worshipper of “silence”.

Sri Aurobindo: Not quite, because he is a music critic!