The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

368 Hymns of the Atris
with nothing in it of the morning vigour and puissant stride of
the original. I have therefore preferred to throw it in translation
into a mould more plastic and natural to the English tongue,
using the constructions and devices of transition which best
suit a modern speech while preserving the logic of the original
thought; and I have never hesitated to reject the bald dictionary
equivalent of the Vedic word for an ampler phrase in the English
where that was necessary to bring out the full sense and associations.
Throughout I have kept my eye fixed on my primary
object — to make the inner sense of the Veda seizable by the
cultured intelligence of today.
When all has been done, the aid of some amount of annotation
remained still indispensable; but I have tried not to
overburden the translation with notes or to indulge in overlong
explanations. I have excluded everything scholastic. In the
Veda there are numbers of words of a doubtful meaning, many
locutions whose sense can only be speculatively or provisionally
fixed, not a few verses capable of two or more different interpretations.
But a translation of this kind is not the place for any
record of the scholar’s difficulties and hesitations. I have also
prefixed a brief outline of the main Vedic thought indispensable
to the reader who wishes to understand.
He will expect only to seize the general trend and surface
suggestions of the Vedic hymns. More would be hardly possible.
To enter into the very heart of the mystic doctrine, we
must ourselves have trod the ancient paths and renewed the
lost discipline, the forgotten experience. And which of us can
hope to do that with any depth or living power? Who in this
Age of Iron shall have the strength to recover the light of the
Forefathers or soar above the two enclosing firmaments of mind
and body into their luminous empyrean of the infinite Truth?
The Rishis sought to conceal their knowledge from the unfit,
believing perhaps that the corruption of the best might lead to
the worst and fearing to give the potent wine of the Soma to
the child and the weakling. But whether their spirits still move
among us looking for the rare Aryan soul in a mortality that is
content to leave the radiant herds of the Sun for ever imprisoned