Extract from Sri Aurobindo's notes on one of his translations, with regards to Puranic imagery etc.:
//Śabdāyante madhuram anilaiḥ kīcakāḥ pūryamāṇāḥ, Saṁsaktābhis tripuravijayo gīyate kinnarībhiḥ; Nirhrādas te muraja iva cet kandareṣu dhvaniḥ syāt, Saṅgītārtho nanu paśupates tatra bhāvī samagraḥ.
Rendered into [literal English] this is "The bamboos filling with the winds are noising sweetly, the Tripour-conquest is being sung by the glued-together Kinnaries; if thy thunder should be in the glens like the sound on a drum the material of the concert of the Beast-Lord is to be complete there, eh?" My own translation runs
Of Tripour slain in lovely dances joined And linkèd troops the Oreads of the hill Are singing and inspired with rushing wind Sweet is the noise of bamboos fluting shrill; Thou thundering in the mountain-glens with cry Of drums shouldst the sublime orchestra fill.
"Of Tripour slain are singing" (tripuravijayo gīyate) requires little comment. The word tripura means the "three cities" and refers to the three material qualities of rajas, sattva & tamas, light, passion & darkness, which have to be slain by Sheva the emancipator before the soul can rejoin God; but there is no reference here to the theosophic basis of the legend, but purely to the legend itself, the conquest of the demon Tripoura by Mahadeva.
There was no means of avoiding the mythological allusion & its unfamiliarity had simply to be accepted. Saṁsaktābhiḥ, meaning "linked close together in an uninterrupted chain", is here rendered by "joined in linkèd troops"; but this hardly satisfies the requirement of poetic translation, for the term suggests to an Indian a very common practice which does not, I think, exist in Europe, women taking each other's hands and dancing as they sing, generally in a circle; to express this in English, so as to create the same picture as the Sanscrit conveys, it was necessary to add "in lovely dances".
The word Kinnaries presents a serious initial difficulty. The Purana mythologising partly from false etymology has turned these Kinnars into men & women with horse-faces & this description has been copied down into all Sanscrit dictionaries, but the Kinnaries of Valmekie had little resemblance with these Puranic grotesques; they are beings of superhuman beauty, unearthly sweetness of voice & wild freedom who seldom appear on the earth, their home is in the mountains & in the skies; he speaks of a young Kinnar snared & bound by men & the mother wailing over her offspring; and Kekayie lying on the ground in her passion of grief & anger is compared to a Kinnarie fallen from the skies.
In all probability they were at first a fugitive image of the strange wild voices of the wind galloping and crying in the mountaintops. The idea of speed would then suggest the idea of galloping horses and by the usual principle of Puranic allegory, which was intellectual rather than artistic, the head, the most prominent & essential member of the human body, would be chosen as the seat of the symbol.
Kalidasa had in this as in many other instances to take the Puranic allegorisation of the old poetic figure and new-subject it to the law of artistic beauty. In no case does he depart from the Puranic conception, but his method is to suppress the ungainly elements of the idea, often preserving it only in an epithet, and bring into prominence all the elements of beauty. Here the horse-faces are entirely suppressed & the picture offered is that of women singing with unearthly voices on the mountain-tops.
The use of the word Kinnarie here would have no poetic propriety; to the uninstructed it would mean nothing and to the instructed would suggest only the ungainly horse-face which Kalidasa here ignores and conflict with the idea of wild & divine melody which is emphasized. I have therefore translated "the Oreads of the hills"; these spirits of the mountains are the only image in English which can at all render the idea of beauty & vague strangeness here implied; at the same time I have used the apparently tautologous enlargement "of the hills" because it was necessary to give some idea of the distant, wild & mystic which the Greek Oreads does not in itself quite bring out. I have moreover transposed the two lines in translation for very obvious reasons.
The first line demands still more careful translation. The word śabdāyante means literally "sound, make a noise," but unlike its English rendering it is a rare word used by Kalidasa for the sake of a certain effect of sound and a certain shade of signification; while therefore rendering by "noise" I have added the epithet "shrill" to bring it up to the required value.
Again the force & sound of pūryamāṇāḥ cannot be rendered by its literal rendering "filled" and anila, one of the many beautiful & significant Sanscrit words for wind,—vāyu, anila, pavana, samīra, samīraṇa, vāta, prabhañjana, marut, sadāgati,—suggests powerfully the breath and flowing of wind & is in the Upanishad used as equivalent to prana, the breath or emotional soul; to render adequately the word "inspired" has been preferred to "filled" and the epithet "rushing" added to "wind" Kīcakāḥ pūryamāṇāḥ anilaiḥ in the original suggests at once the sound of the flute, because the flute is in India made of the hollow bamboo & the shrillness of the word kīcakāḥ assists the suggestion; in English it was necessary to define the metaphor.
The last two lines of the stanza have been rendered with great closeness except for the omission of nanu and the substitution of the epithet "sublime" for paśupates. Nanu is a Sanscrit particle which sometimes asks a rhetorical question but more often suggests one answered; the delicate shades suggested by the Sanscrit particles cannot be represented in English or only by gross effects which would be intolerably excessive & rhetorical.
The omission of Pasupati, the name of Sheva as the Lord of Wildlife, though not necessary, is I think justified. He is sufficiently suggested by the last stanza & to those who understand the allusion, by the reference to Tripoura; the object of suggesting the wild & sublime which is served in Sanscrit by introducing this name, is equally served in English by the general atmosphere of wild remoteness & the insertion of the epithet "sublime".
This analysis of a single stanza, ex uno disce omnes, will be enough to show the essential fidelity which underlies the apparent freedom of my translation.//
Sri Aurobindo - On Translating Kalidasa
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