Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Two. On Literature
The Poetry of Kalidasa
On Translating Kalidasa [1]
Since the different tribes of the human Babel began to study each other’s literatures1, the problem of poetical translation has constantly defied the earnest experimenter.
There have been brilliant versions, successful falsifications, honest renderings, but some few lyrics apart a successful translation there has not been.
Yet it cannot be that a form of effort so earnestly and persistently pursued and so necessary to the perfection of culture and advance of civilisation, is the vain pursuit of a chimera.
Nothing which mankind earnestly attempts is impossible, not even the conversion of copper into gold or the discovery of the elixir of life or the power of aerial motion; but so2 long as experiment proceeds on mistaken lines, based on a mistaken conception of the very elements of the problem, it must necessarily fail3.
Man may go on fashioning wings for himself for ever but they will never lift him into the empyrean: the essence of the problem is to conquer the attraction of the earth which cannot be done by any material means.
Poetical translation was long dominated by the superstition that the visible word is the chief factor in language and the unit which must be seized on as a basis in rendering; the result is seen in so-called translations which reproduce the sense of the original faultlessly and yet put us into an atmosphere which we at once recognize4 to be quite alien to the atmosphere of the original; we say then that the rendering is a faithful one or a success of esteem or a makeshift or a caput mortuum according to the nature of our predilections and the measure of our urbanity.
The nineteenth century has been the first to recognize5 generally that there is a spirit behind the word and dominating the word which eludes the “faithful” translator and that it is more important to get at the spirit of a poet than his exact sense.
But after its manner it has contented itself with the generalisation and not attempted to discover the lines on which the generalisation must 
be crystallised into6 practice, its extent and its limitations.
Every translator has been a law to himself; and the result is anarchic confusion.
As the sole tangible benefit there has been discovered a new art not yet perfected of translation into prose poetry.
Such translation has many advantages; it allows the translator to avail himself of manifold delicacies of rhythm without undergoing the labour of verse formation and to compromise with the orthodox superstition by rendering the word unit yet with some show of preserving the original flavour.
But even in the best of these translations it is little more than a beautiful show.
Poetry can only be translated by poetry and verse forms by verse forms.
It remains to approach the task of translation in a less haphazard spirit, to realise our7 essential aim, to define exactly what elements in poetry demand rendering, how far and by what law of equivalent values each may be rendered and if all cannot be reproduced, which of them may in each particular case be sacrificed without injuring the essential worth of the translation.
Most of the translations of Kalidasa here offered to the public have been written after the translator had arrived at such a definite account with himself and in conscientious conformity to its results.
Others done while he yet saw his goal no more than dimly and was blindly working his way to the final solution, may not be so satisfactory.
I do not pretend that I have myself arrived at the right method; but I am certain that reasoned and thoughtful attempts of this sort can alone lead to it.
Now that nations are turning away from the study of the great classical languages to physical and practical science and resorting even to modern languages, if for literature at all then for contemporary literature, it is imperative that the ennobling influences spiritual, romantic and imaginative of the old tongues should be popularised in modern speech; otherwise the modern world, vain of its fancied superiority and limiting itself more and more to its own type of ideas with no opportunity of saving immersions in the past and recreative destructions of the present, will soon petrify and perish in the mould of a rigid realism and materialism.
Among their influences the beauty and power of their secular and religious poetry is perhaps the most potent and formative.