Aryamani in Brazil presenting her translation A Vida Divina
Many years ago, Aryamani decided to translate The Life Divine
into Portuguese. “Initially, I was doing it for myself. Translating was a way for
me to enter into this difficult and complex work. And I got so much help, in an
inner sense, with the translation; somehow, it didn’t come from me.”
It took her six years. The complexity
lay not only in the content but also in the challenge of translating it into
Portuguese. “Portuguese is a very rich language, the vocabulary is very vast,
but each language has its own rhythm, and Sri Aurobindo’s writings are
“mantric”. It is almost close to impossible to re-create this rhythm in a
translation.. And sometimes Sri Aurobindo creates new terms in English and I
had to do the same for the Portuguese. Above all, I wanted the language of the
translation to be not only beautiful, but most of all, to be faithful to the
original. Today, almost all languages seem to have become v...
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1 Comments
one of the best articles, in this issue, Alan, superb, her experience and for sharing this, one Brazilian university prof. ahd contacted me 20 yrs ago wanting to meet Kishore Gandhi, he was translating ''the Human Cycle'' and teaching sociology, might be Aryamnai knows him..fantastic her journey, congratulate her for her attempt. knew a Spanish lady in ashram Samarpita who was translating some of Sri Aurobindo's works, into Spanish, she left in mid-eighties, and gave her Spanish english dictionaries to ashram school...where I work...