SAVITRI ?

What can we say of it that can’t distort this Reality?
We had this desire, to escape from the ambient sullenness and shiver of Auroville, to have a quick look at those writings. We are not however an impressive Anglicist but we tried then in that end and beginning of millennium to find a lifebelt (temporal as well as timeless) which could rescue us to a continent of Sincerity and Life. We were not mistaken when we poked the tip of our nose into it, the aspiration was so intense and so much the source of safeguard and of recognition that we had to dive into it, to submerge. We cannot avoid to have a little dig (too bad for us !) at the one who told us then : “But why to translate Savitri if there is already a translation of it and may be even an other one under way by Satprem, why to spend your time doing “this” while there is so much to do for Auroville in other far more “necessary and useful” occupations.

My Lord ! … would certainly be the response of Sri Aurobindo.
How is it possible not to make the difference between the “reading” and the “translating” ? In fact, we never were truly interested in those already existing translations (not that we have any particular criticisms against them to formulate !) and very simply I do not believe for the little that we have read of them, having been really touched as we had been by the fact of translating.
To translate Savitri was for us to enter in the intimate secret of the submerged Life by the Substance, to contact the Meaning by the invisible, to live the Essential modeled by the spirit of Sri Aurobindo. According to the sayings of the exegetes who studied it, all the essence of his experience is woven in those lines — which we do not doubt at all —, the poetry can not evidently be a succession of floating words in beautiful and well turned sentences which flatter the mind, but the tangible Reality holding the real Light through the intimate of our responsive substances. The spirit can be completely tangible for the one who lives it at that dimension, in the same way than the materiality of our existence. We had kept from this experience the deep feeling of a blessing, as this word translates it so truly, how could it be different, couldn’t it ? We have also noticed how well we could settle on the creative aspects of our own nature to express what could be called our “essentiality”, which is the best of the being, for us it was certainly DHANUSHMAT, at least with hindsight it is like this and here that this acknowledgement with this major Recognition is being made today.
Just as in those days in Occident we are infinitely conscious of our gap with this work which can only be approached when the being and the soul are ready to offer and to give at the best of themselves. Without that, it is a dead, inert and dull letter. Savitri cannot be read as a beautiful poetry nor a beautiful story or legend, it is source of Life which infiltrates the fibers of all the being levels, all the way to the intimate certitude of the cell. For the one who is not in this quasi spherical vision which can connect everything in one point, in the instant, he only will very certainly find well turned sentences being able to flatter the intellect and aesthethicism ; those brilliant companions of our heavy trajectories of earth ; and besides why not ? Needless to proselytise there is something for everyone and thank goodness it is enough complex and sometimes also… well complicated, in our still unrevealed obscure aspects ! Meanwhile it is necessary to remember that the Mental — essentially when it is well shined and nickel-chrome polished, whatever beautiful tool it is when it is used even advisedly, is not and does not remain less or more the powerful “builder” of our spirit vision’ narrowness.
Satprem insists in his own trajectory and cellular descent on the multiple meanings which can be taken by certain words translated from the english (ex: a spell), then in the same perspective, how is it possible to translate a text if we are not, ourselves, in the right intimate and ever-changing Reality, how is it possible to take such a responsibility to offer to the “other” the reduction of his own mediocrity — even the best one that we can offer to him ! — if we did not live the experience lead by the formula ? To dare to propose a translation of Savitri is somewhere being Sri Aurobindo himself in the spirit of the own, personal and creative nature of the one who translates, at the level of yogic Conscience that He had reached at the time of this flow which took place during so many years of Work. We shall prefer not to take this risk, besides we do not feel up to it at this moment of our life.
It is then precisely for that reason we shall not present on this website this translation that we have done with so much joy, it would be necessary to be today completely opened and able to dive fully into the Yoga for not bringing any deviancies on what will certainly remain for me an “untranslatable” from the opinion of the edition world.
Meanwhile, as we wish to each one of all of us to touch this Reality, this Experience, it is evidently a work of Yoga, whether certain of those well thinking gentlemen of Auroville agree or not, I wish them deeply that they can recognize it some day.

Translated by Annick PETITDEMANGE
With the participation of the author