Sri Aurobindo
The Harmony of Virtue
Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910
Kalidasa
On Translating Kalidasa [2]
But1 just as the body of a man is also soul, has in each of its cells a separate portion of spirit, so it is with the mechanical form of a verse.
The importance of metre arises from the fact that different arrangements of sound have different spiritual and emotional values, tend to produce that is to say by virtue of the fixed succession of sounds a fixed spiritual atmosphere and a given type of emotional exaltation and the mere creative power of sound though a material thing is yet near to spirit, is very great; great on the material and ascending in force through the moral and intellectual, culminating on the emotional plane.
It is a factor of the first importance in music and poetry.
In these different arrangements of syllabic sound metre forms the most important, at least the most tangible element.
Every poet who has sounded his own consciousness must be aware that management of metre is the gate of his inspiration and the law of his success.
There is a double process, his state of mind and spirit suggesting its own syllabic measure, and the metre again confirming, prolonging and recreating the original state of mind and spirit.
Inspiration itself seems hardly so much a matter of ideas or feeling as of rhythm.
Even when the ideas or the feelings are active, they will not usually run into the right form, the words will not take their right places, the syllables will not fall into a natural harmony.
But if one has or succeeds in awaking the right metrical mood, if the metrical form instead of being deliberately created, creates itself or becomes, a magical felicity of thought, diction and harmony attends it and seems even to be created by it.
Ideas and words come rapidly and almost as rapidly take their right places as in a well ordered assembly where everyone knows his seat.
When the metre comes right, everything else comes right; when the metre has to be created with effort, everything else has to be done with effort, and the result has to be worked on over and over again before it satisfies.
This supreme importance of the metrical form might seem at first sight to justify the transplanters of metre.
For if it be the aim of good translation to reproduce not merely the mechanical meanings of words, the corresponding verbal counters used in the rough and ready business of interlingual commerce, but to create the same spiritual, emotional and aesthetic effect as the original, the first condition is obviously to identify our spiritual condition, as far as may be, with that of the poet at the time when he wrote and then to embody the emotion in verse.
This cannot be done without finding a metre which shall have the same spiritual and emotional value as the metre of the original.
Even when one has been found, there will naturally be no success unless the mind of the translator has sufficient kinship, sufficient points of spiritual and emotional contact and a sufficient basis of common poetical powers not only to enter into but to render the spiritual temperament and the mood of that temperament, of which his text was the expression; hence a good poetical translation is the rarest thing in the world.
Conversely even if all these requisites exist, they will not succeed to the full without the discovery of the right metre.
Is the right metre then the metre of the original?
Must an adequate version of Homer, a real translation, be couched in the hexameter?
At first sight it would seem so.
But the issue is here complicated by the hard fact that the same arrangement of quantities or of accents has very seldom the same spiritual and emotional value in two different languages.
The hexameter in English, however skilfully managed, has not the same value as the Homeric, the English alexandrine does not render the French; terza rima in Latinised Saxon sounds entirely different from the noble movement of the Divina Commedia, the stiff German blank verse of Goethe and Schiller is not the golden Shakespearian harmony.
It is not only that there are mechanical differences, a strongly accentuated language hopelessly varying from those which distribute accent evenly, or a language of ultimate accent like French from one of penultimate accent like Italian or initial accent like English, or one which courts elision from one which shuns it, a million grammatical and syllabic details besides, lead to fundamental differences of sound-notation.
Beyond and beneath these outward differences is the essential soul of the language from which they arise, and which in its turn depends mainly upon the ethnological type always different in different countries because the mixture of different root races in two types even when they seem nearly related is never the same.
The Swedish type for instance which is largely the same as the Norwegian is yet largely different, while the Danish generally classed in the same Scandinavian group differs radically from both.
This is that curse of Babel, after all quite as much a blessing as a curse, which weighs upon no one so heavily as on the conscientious translator of poetry; for the prose translator being more concerned to render the precise idea than emotional effects and the subtle spiritual aura of poetry, treads an immeasurably smoother and more straightforward path.
For some metres at least it seems impossible to find adequate equivalents in other languages.
Why has there never been a real rendering of Homer in English?
It is not the whole truth to say that no modern can put himself back imaginatively into the half-savage Homeric period; a mind with a sufficient basis of primitive sympathies and sufficient power of imaginative self-control to subdue for a time the modern in him may conceivably be found.
But the main, the insuperable obstacle is that no one has ever found or been able to create an English metre with the same spiritual and emotional equivalent as Homer’s marvellous hexameters.
That transmetrisation is a false method, is therefore clear.
The translator’s only resource is to steep himself in the original, quelling that in him which conflicts with its spirit, and remain on the watch for the proper metrical mood in himself.
Sometimes the right metre will come to him, sometimes it will not.
In the latter case effort in this direction will not have been entirely wasted; for spirit, when one gives it a chance, is always stronger than matter and he will be able to impose something of the desired spiritual atmosphere even upon an unsuitable metrical form.
But if he seize on the right metre, he has every chance, supposing him poetically empowered, of creating a translation which shall not only be classical, but shall be the translation.
Wilful choice of metre is always fatal.
William Morris’ Homeric translation failed hopelessly partly because of his affected “Anglosaxon” diction, but still more because he chose to apply a metre good enough possibly for the Volsungasaga to the rendering of a far more mighty and complex spirit.
On the other hand Fitzgerald might have produced a very beautiful version in English had he chosen for his Rubaiyat some ordinary English metre, but his unique success was his reward for discovering the true equivalent of the quatrain in English.
One need only imagine to oneself the difference if Fitzgerald had chosen the ordinary English quatrain instead of the rhyme system of his original.
His Rubaiyat in spite of the serious defect of unfaithfulness will remain the final version of Omar in English, not to be superseded by more faithful renderings, excluding therefore the contingency of a superior poetical genius employing the same metre for a fuller and closer translation.
In Kalidasa another very serious difficulty meets the unhappy translator beyond the usual pitfalls.2
Few great Sanskrit poems employ the same metre throughout.
In the dramas where metrical form is only used when the thought, image or emotion rises above the ordinary level, the poet employs whatever metre he thinks suitable to the mood he is in.
In English, however, such a method would result in opera rather than in drama.
I have therefore thought it best, taking into consideration the poetical feeling and harmonious flow of Kalidasa's prose to use blank verse throughout varying its pitch according as the original form is metrical or prose and the emotion or imagery more or less exalted.
In epic work the licence of metrical variation is not 
quite so great, yet there are several metres considered apt to epic narrative, and Kalidasa varies them without scruple in different cantos, sometimes even in the same canto.
If blank verse be, as I believe it is, a fair equivalent for the anuṣṭubh, the ordinary epic metre, how shall one find others which shall correspond as well to the “thunderbolt” Sloka (Indravajrā) or the3 “lesser thunderbolt” Sloka (upendravajrā)4, “the gambolling-of-the-tiger” Sloka (śārdūlavikrīḍita)5 and all those other wonderful and grandiose rhythmic structures with fascinating names of which Kalidasa is so mighty a master?
Nor would such variation be tolerated by English canons of taste.
In the epic and drama the translator is driven to a compromise and therefore to that extent a failure; he may infuse good poems or plays reproducing the architecture and idea-sense of Kalidasa with something of his spirit, but it is a version and not a translation.
It is only when he comes to the Cloud-Messenger that he is free of this difficulty; for the Cloud-Messenger is written throughout in a single and consistent stanza.
This mandākrāntā or “gently stepping” stanza is entirely quantitative and too complicated to be rendered into any corresponding accentual form.
The6 arrangement of metrical divisions is as follows: spondee-long, dactyl, tribrach, two spondee-shorts, spondee; four lines of this build make up the stanza.
Thus
śabdāyante mādhuramanilaiḥ kīcakāḥ pūryamāṇāḥ
saṃsaktābhis tripuravijayo gīyate kinnarībhiḥ,
nirhrādaste muraja iva cet kandareṣu dhvaniḥ syāt
saṅgītārtho nanu paśupates tatra bhāvī samagraḥ.
In casting about for a metre I was only certain of one thing that neither blank verse nor the royal quatrain stanza would7 serve my purpose; the one has not the necessary basis of recurring harmonics8; in the other the recurrence is too rigid, sharply defined and unvarying to represent the eternal swell and surge of Kalidasa's stanza.
Fortunately, by an inspiration and without deliberate choice, Kalidasa's lines, as I began turning them, flowed into9 the form of triple rhyme and that necessarily suggested the terza rima.
This metre, as I have treated it, seems to me to reproduce with as much accuracy as the difference between the languages allows, the spiritual and emotional atmosphere of the Cloud-Messenger.
The terza rima in English lends itself naturally to the principle of variation in recurrence which imparts so singular a charm to this poem, recurrence in especial of certain words, images, assonances, harmonies, but recurrence always with a difference so as to keep one note sounding through the whole performance underneath its various harmony.
In terza rima the triple rhyme 
immensely helps this effect, for it allows of the same common rhymes recurring but usually with a difference in one or more of their company.
It is a common10 opinion that terza rima does not suit the English language and cannot therefore be naturalised, that it must always remain an exotic.
This seems to me a fallacy.
Any metre capable of accentual representation in harmony with the accentual law of the English language, can be naturalised in English.
If it has not yet been done, we must attribute it to some initial error of conception.
Byron and Shelley failed because they wanted to create the same effect with this instrument as Dante had done; but terza rima in English can never have the same effect as in Italian.
In the one it is a metre of woven harmonies suitable to noble and intellectual narrative; in the other it can only be a metre of woven melodies suitable to beautiful description or elegiac sweetness.
To occasional magnificences or sublimities it lends itself admirably, but I should doubt whether it could even in the strongest hands sustain the burden of a long and noble epic of the soul and mind like the Divina Commedia.
But it is not true that it cannot be made in English a perfectly natural, effective and musical form.
It is certainly surprising that Shelley with his instinct for melody, did not perceive the conditions of the problem.
His lyric metres and within certain limitations his blank verse are always fine, so fine that if the matter and manner were equal to the melody, he would have been one of the few great poets instead of one of the many who have just missed being great.
But his Triumph of Life is a metrical failure.
We feel that the poet is aiming at a metrical effect which he has not accomplished.
The second question, but a far simpler one, is the use of rhyme.
It may be objected that as in the Sanscrit there is no rhyme, the introduction of this element into the English version would disturb the closeness of the spiritual equivalent by the intrusion of a foreign ornament.
But this is to argue from a quantitative to an accentual language, which is always a mistake.
There are certain effects easily created within the rich quantitative variety of ancient languages, of which an equivalent in English can only be found by the aid of rhyme.
No competent critic would declare Tennyson’s absurd experiment in Boadicea an equivalent to the rushing, stumbling and leaping metre of the Attis with its singular and rare effects.
A proper equivalent would only be found in some rhymed system and preferably I should fancy in some system of unusually related but intricate and closely recurring rhymes.
Swinburne might have done it; for Swinburne’s work, though with few exceptions poor work as poetry, is a marvellous repertory of successful metrical experiments.
I have already indicated the appropriateness of the triple rhyme system of the terza rima to the Cloud Messenger.
English is certainly not a language of easy rhyming like the southern tongues of Europe; but given in the poet a copious command of words and a natural swing and felicity, laeta rather than curiosa, it is amply enough provided for any ordinary call upon its resources.
There are however two critical superstitions which seriously interfere with the naturalness and ease rhymed poetry demands, the superstition of the perfect rhyme and the superstition of the original rhyme.
It is no objection to a rhyme that it is imperfect.
There is nothing occult or cryptic in rhyme, no divine law compelling us to assimilate two rhymed endings to the very letter such as the law of the Védic chant by which a single letter mispronounced sterilizes the mantra.
Rhyme is a convenience and an ornament intended to serve certain artistic purposes, to create certain sound-effects, and if the effect of a perfect rhyme is beautiful, melodious and satisfying, an imperfect rhyme has sometimes its own finer effect far more subtle, haunting and suggestive; by limiting the satisfaction of the ear, it sets a new chord vibrating in the soul.
A poem with an excessive proportion of imperfect rhymes is unsatisfactory, because it would not satisfy the natural human craving for regularity and order; but the slavish use of perfect rhymes only would be still more inartistic because it would not satisfy the natural human craving for liberty and variety.
In this respect and in a hundred others the disabilities of the English language have been its blessings; the artistic labour and the opportunity for calling a subtler harmony out of discord have given its best poetical literature a force and power quite out of proportion to the natural abilities of the race.
There are of course limits to every departure from rigidity but the degree of imperfection admissible in a rhyme is very great so long as it does not evolve harshness or vulgarism.
Mrs. Browning’s rhymes are bad in this respect, but why?
Because “tyrants” and “silence” is no rhyme at all, while “candles” and “angels” involves a hideous vulgarism; and in less glaring instances the law of double rhymes generally requiring closer correspondence than single is totally disregarded.
The right use of imperfect rhymes is not to be forbidden because of occasional abuse.
It is also no objection to a rhyme that it is “hackneyed”.
A hackneyed thought, a hackneyed phrase there may be, but a hackneyed rhyme seems to me a contradiction in terms.
Rhyme is no part of the intellectual warp and woof of a poem, but a pure ornament the only object of which is to assist the soul with beauty; it appeals to the soul not through the intellect or imagination but through the ear.
Now the oldest and most often used rhymes are generally the most beautiful and we ought not to sacrifice that beauty merely out of an unreasoning impatience of what is old.
Common rhymes have a wonderful charm of their own and come to us laden with a thousand beautiful associations.
The pursuit of mere originality can only lead us to such unpardonable extravagances as “haunches stir” and “Manchester”.
Such rhymes any poet can multiply who chooses to prostitute his genius to the amusement of the gallery, or is sufficiently unpoetic to prefer the freedom of barbarous uncouthness to that self-denial which is the secret of grace and beauty.
On the other hand if we pursue originality and beauty together, we end in preciosity or an artificial grace, and what are these but the spirit of Poetry lifting her wings to abandon that land and that literature for a long season or sometimes for ever?
Unusual and peculiar rhymes demand to be sparingly used and always for the definite object of setting in relief common rhymes rather than for the sake of their own strangeness.
The question of metre and rhymes being satisfactorily settled there comes the crucial question of fidelity, on which every translator has to make his own choice at his own peril.
On one side is the danger of sacrificing the spirit to the letter, on the other the charge of writing a paraphrase or a poem of one’s own under the cloak of translation.
Here as elsewhere it seems to me that rigid rules are out of place.
What we have to keep in mind is not any rigid law, but the object with which we are translating.
If we merely want to render, to acquaint foreign peoples with the ideas and subject matter of the writer, as literal a rendering as idiom will allow, will do our business.
If we wish to give a poetical version, to clothe the general sense and spirit of the writer in our own words, paraphrase and unfaithfulness become permissible; the writer has not intended to translate and it is idle to criticise him with reference to an ideal he never entertained.
But the ideal of a translation is something different from either of these.
The translator seeks first to place the mind of the reader in the same spiritual atmosphere as the original; he seeks next to produce in him the same emotions and the same kind of poetical delight and aesthetic gratification, and lastly he seeks to convey to him the thought of the poet and substance in such words as will create, as far as may be, the same or a similar train of associations, the same pictures or the same sensuous impressions.
This is an ideal to which one can never do more than approximate; but the nearer one approximates to it, the better the translation.
How it shall be done, depends upon the judgment, the sympathetic instinct of the poet, the extent to which he is imbued with the associations of both languages and can render not merely word by word but shade by shade, not only signification by signification, but suggestion by suggestion.
There is one initial stumbling block which can never be quite got over; the mythology, fauna and flora of Indian literature are absolutely alien to Europe.
(We are in a different world; this is no peaceful English world of field or garden and woodland with the cheerful song of the thrush or the redbreast, the nightingale warbling in the night by some small and quiet river, the lark soaring in the morning to the pale blue skies; no country of deep snows and light suns and homely toil without spiritual presences save the borrowed fancies of the Greeks or shadowy metaphysical imaginations of the poet’s brain that haunt thought’s aery wildernesses, no people homely [and] matter of fact, never rising far above earth or sinking far below it.
We have instead a mother of gigantic rivers, huge sombre forests and mountains whose lower slopes climb above the clouds;11 the roar of the wild beasts fills those forests and the cry of innumerable birds peoples those rivers; and in their midst lives a people who have soared into the highest heavens of the spirit, experienced the grandest and most illimitable thoughts possible to the intellect and sounded the utmost depths of sensuous indulgence; so fierce is the pulse of life that even trees and inanimate things seem to have life, emotions, a real and passionate history and over all move mighty presences of gods and spirits who are still real to the consciousness of the people.)