While Sri Aurobindo brought his gifts for epic and dramatic poetry to translating Sanskrit literature, when it comes to his translations from Bengali, what strikes one most is his mastery of the lyrical style. A notable contribution is the manner in which he made the beauty of Vaishnava bhakti poetry accessible to the reader of English. This included the poetry of Vidyapati (c 1352-1448).
The poet Vidyapati lived in what is now Bihar and wrote in a form of Maithili closely related to the Bengali of his time, but had a broad influence on the early development of the literatures of eastern India. Sri Aurobindo read Vidyapati’s Padavaliin the 1890s in the context of the Bengali tradition and translated selections from it into exquisite English verse. Here Radha speaks of falling hopelessly in love with Krishna; in the last couplet, the poet consoles her:
I know not what this lovely thief
Did to me in that moment brief.
Surely such craft none yet possessed!
He robbed my heart out of its nest
Only with seeing, and gone is he
Taking my poor heart far from me.
And ah! his eyes did then express
Such tenderness, such tenderness,
The more I labour to forget
My very soul remembers it.
Mourn not, sweet girl, for thy heart’s sake;
Who took thy heart, thyself at last shall take.
More modern Bengali poetry and prose also received Sri Aurobindo’s attention. The most important work of modern literature he translated was the famous novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath.
Sri Aurobindo regarded Bankim as ‘a seer and nation-builder’, the rishi ‘who gave us the reviving mantra which is creating a new India, the mantra Bande Mataram’. His translation of Anandamath was left unfinished, as he was in the midst of serialising it in weekly instalments in Karmayogin, the journal edited by Sri Aurobindo, when he abruptly left Calcutta in February 1910, never to return.
Fortunately, the chapters he completed include the one containing the words to ‘Bande Mataram’, the song that played such a conspicuous role in the Indian freedom struggle. Sri Aurobindo’s poetic rendering of this song is undoubtedly his most widely read translation. Besides its occurrence in the narrative setting of the tenth chapter of the novel, it is also reproduced separately along with a more literal prose version.
Sri Aurobindo took advantage of moving to south India in 1910 to further enrich his linguistic versatility with a knowledge of Tamil. He could not continue his study long enough to achieve the same level of proficiency as in the other languages.
But, in 1915, with help from his friend Subramania Bharati, the Tamil poet, he published translations of a few poems of Vaishnava saints of the eighth and ninth centuries in Arya.
A little later, he rendered into English a chapter and a half of the classic text on ethics and morality, the Kural, written by the ancient poet and philosopher Tiruvalluvar. The flavour of these translations into poetic prose is illustrated in the following lines from the ancient Vaishnavite poet-saint Nammalwar’s ‘Hymn of the Golden Age’:
’Tis glory, glory, glory! For Life’s hard curse has expired; swept
out are Pain and Hell, and Death has nought to do here. Mark
ye, the Iron Age shall end....We have seen, we have seen, we have seen – seen things full
sweet for our eyes. Come, all ye lovers of god, let us shout and
dance for joy with oft-made surrenderings....The Iron Age shall change. It shall fade, it shall pass away. The
gods shall be in our midst. The mighty Golden Age shall hold
the earth and the flood of the highest Bliss shall swell....
Sri Aurobindo’s translations from Greek and Latin take up only a few pages at the end of this volume. But spanning half a century as they do, they show his growing mastery of these two languages, and include some remarkable examples of the art of poetic translation.
For the opening passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey, he used Homer’s own metre – the dactylic hexameter – whose successful handling had defied the efforts of a number of well-known English poets. His translation of the beginning of the Iliad, dating from around 1901, shows the possibilities of rendering Homer into English hexameters without entirely fulfilling them.
But by the time he translated the opening of the Odyssey, around 1913, he was already working on Ilion, his original epic in the Homeric style and metre. By then, he was on the way to perfecting his technique and capturing the surging rhythmic movement that has earned Homer a place among the world’s supreme poets. Future translators of the blind bard might do well to find inspiration in lines such as these:
Sing to me, Muse, of the man many-counselled who far through the world’s ways
Wandering was tossed after Troya he sacked, the divine stronghold,
Many cities of men he beheld, learned the minds of their dwellers,
Many the woes in his soul he suffered driven on the waters,
Fending from fate his life and the homeward course of his comrades.
Them even so he saved not for all his desire and his striving;
Who by their own infatuate madness piteously perished,
Fools in their hearts! for they slew the herds the deity pastured,
Helios high-climbing....
Translations is a volume which can easily be overlooked. Yet, Sri Aurobindo engaged with translations throughout his life on several levels, from the most technical to the most philosophical. ‘Your life on this earth,’ he wrote in an essay, ‘is a divine poem that you are translating into earthly language.’ In this sense, his whole philosophy could be explained in terms of the translation of the divine into the human.
More pragmatically, he recognised the growing importance of translation between languages at a time when humanity was being drawn together as never before.
Unity among humans requires communication, but Sri Aurobindo regarded the preservation of diversity as equally essential. Translation mediates between these two needs, encouraging and enabling mutual appreciation of the great variety of ways in which cultures in the East and West, from ancient to modern times, have expressed our common humanity.
Much of Sri Aurobindo’s specific contribution was to translate classical literature in India into English. If these literatures are to occupy the place they deserve in world literature, there must be translations that bring them to life for a global readership. Recognising their importance, Sri Aurobindo applied all his skill to producing translations that can be enjoyed in their own right, while giving an authentic taste of the distinctive qualities of the original works.
Collected in a single volume, they represent a significant part of his literary achievement, reveal a deep understanding of the translator’s craft, and form an appealing introduction to a broad sample of Indian and world literature.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Translations’, by Richard Hartz, from Reading Sri Aurobindo, edited by Gautam Chikarmane and Devdip Ganguli, Ebury Press.
