The English of Savitri

The contents of The English of Savitri are based on the transcripts of classes given by Shraddhavan, a native English speaker, from August 2009 to October 2010 at Savitri Bhavan in Auroville. She had first started teaching English through readings of Savitri in 1980, and resumed this in 1998 in the thatched hut which was the first construction on the Savitri Bhavan site. The classes were completed more than 10 years later in May 2009, when the group reached the end of the poem. After a few months a new start was made, this time recorded. Edited transcripts of these classes were published serially in Savitri Bhavan’s magazine Invocation. Now the first five cantos of Book One, The Book of Beginnings, have been published in this first volume of The English of Savitri.

It is common knowledge that Savitri is difficult to understand. “The Mother has said that the lines of Savitri are mantras which have the power to communicate the experience from which they have originated,” writes Shraddhavan. She then explains that for a proper understanding, first one needs to get the sound right – the right rhythm, the correct pronunciation and the right sound-vibrations. Then one has to gain more understanding of the literal meaning of the lines – understand what each of the words and the images used mean and how the words in each sentence and the sentences themselves are linked together; and then only can the mind concentrate on the lines “until an explosion of deeper mental understanding is experienced.” The final step is when the mind falls silent and “may be blessed to receive a revelation of the origin of the mantra, which is beyond words and thought and comes as a living experience.”

The focus of the English of Savitri classes is on the first two of these four steps, but as Shraddhavan writes, “we have found that even without much understanding, the mantric vibration of the words and lines can touch us deeply and sometimes wake up an inner knowledge or experience in a quite unexpected way. This is the action of Savitri’s atmosphere, of Savitri’s grace.”

Sri Aurobindo wrote that for his poem to become widely appreciated and understood, “there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry.” This book is a welcome and highly recommended contribution to help that extension of consciousness. We look forward to the next volume of The English of Savitri.