Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 4. Translation
Practice

Remarks on Some Translations [3]

Your translations.

1. Translation of {{0}}Baudelaire,[[Élévation (in Les fleurs du mal) — Ed.]] very good, third and fourth verse superb. Literalness here does not matter so long as you are faithful to the spirit and the sense. But I don’t think you are justified in inserting indriyera — volupté here means bold and intense pleasure of the higher vital, not the lesser pleasure of the senses,— it is the volupté you do actually get when you rise, whether inwardly or outwardly like the aviators into the boundless heights.

2. {{0}}Shelley.[[One word is too often profaned — Ed.]] Good poetry, but as a translation vulnerable in the head and the tail. In the head because, it seems to me that your সে ধন [se dhana] and তা বলি [tā bali] lays or may lay itself open to the construction that human love is a rich precious thing which the poet 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, still, if it is at all open to a meaning of this kind, then it says the very reverse of Shelley’s intended significance. For in the 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 to the star, as night to the day. And will not you 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. 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 not because your version is not good, but 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.

3. {{0}}Amal.[[This errant life (see page 501 – 02) — Ed.]] I think here you have not so much rendered the English lines into Bengali as translated Amal into Dilip. Is not that the sense of your plea for Bengali colour and simile? Amal’s lines are not easily translatable, least of all, I imagine, into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one — no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow; no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling — the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing of all that is transferable. You have taken his last line and put in a lotus face and made divine love bloom in it,— a pretty image, but how far from the glowing impassioned severity of phrase, “And mould thy love into a human face”! So with your মধুর গোপনে [madhura gopane] and the “heart to heart words intimate”. I do not suppose it could have been done otherwise, however, or done better; and what you write now is always good poetry — which is what I suppose Tagore meant to say when he wrote “তোমার আর ভয় নাহি” [“tomāra āra bhaẏa nāhi”].

And after all I have said nothing about Huxley or Baudelaire!

11 July 1931