Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.

One feels something opaque, not transparent, not allowing light to pass through; “impenetrable”, one cannot get through it. “Her” means Night’s. “Muse” is meditative thinking, contemplation by the mind of Night; “eyeless”, it is blind, shut in itself. This Muse is a symbol, as it were; it is sombre, gloomy. In that symbol of her muse, one feels the bottomless chasm of the Infinite without form, the Infinite which has not yet taken a body. This abysm is opaque. And then the poet sums up:

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

It is always Sri Aurobindo’s style in this epic: he describes something, narrates an event, and then he he sums up in one line the entire purport. Also, at times, he states something in one line, something profound, and there follows a long passage developing that point.

The world has not yet come. Where the world is to be, there is a zero, śūnya. But it is not an empty zero, one can’t fathom what it is; if it was empty, there would be nothing to be fathomed. It is a pregnanat zero, full of content. This contentful zero is a perception special to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. The Shunya or the Nihil of which the Illusionist philosophies or the Buddha speaks is an empty zero. this zero is different: out of this zero come the million universes, they are all there in its bosom potentially. The “zero” indicates that it can’t be defined, can’t be determined. It exceeds all mental formulations. Such a fathomless zero is occupying everything.

It was in August 1947, I believe, that this canto was first published and my guide and teacher Sri Kapali Sastriar translated it into Sanskrit. As he was working upon it, each day he would send up to Sri Aurobindo with Purani the verses he had done. Sri Aurobindo would go through the translation with interest. [1] He would send word appreciating certain renderings. “He is a poet”—was one of his spontaneous remarks. He would also point out where his intended meaning had not been fully brought out. It was at that time we got an inkling into Sri Aurobindo’s mind here. The verse would be revised or recast, where necessary, in the light of his observations. Thus it went on until Sastriar translated the entire first canto, the most difficult canto of the Book into Sanskrit.

And I, personally, began to understand Savitri only through the Sanskrit version. When I read it in English, I felt it was mystic and beyond me. But when Sastriar was translating it, he would read it out, and when I read it afterwards, it made meaningto me. It is a pity he didn’t continue with the translation.

[1] It is doubtful if Sri Aurobindo read these verses himself because of his weak eyesight; most probably Purani must have read them out to him. ~ RYD