|
Notes on the Texts
Record of Yoga. 1-25 July 1912. The Record for this period, entitled "Journal of Yoga", was kept in a large ledger used otherwise for notes on linguistics and for prose writings on many subjects.
Record of Yoga. 12 October-26 November 1912. The Record of this period, as well as certain undated notes from the same time, were written in a small notebook used earlier for Vedic and linguistic notes, translations, poetry (in Bengali and Latin), etc., and also for a brief record of Sortileges of May and June 1912. The entries of 18 October to 17 November were written in ink on consecutive pages (with one page left blank between the first and second entries of 18 October). The remainder of the entries were written in purple pencil on scattered pages, sometimes upside down in relation to the rest of the entries.
Unused Passages for Savitri. The texts published under this heading have been transcribed from manuscripts that were not directly used in the formation of the final version of Savitri. In each case, there is at least some reason to suspect that these manuscripts, found among the thousands of pages of drafts and typescripts for the poem, may have been accidentally overlooked at the point where they should have been presented to Sri Aurobindo by his scribe for revision. However that may be, the fact that Sri Aurobindo used another manuscript as he proceeded to the final stages of revision, would make it problematic for an editor to try to incorporate lines from any of these unused versions into the body of the epic. Therefore these passages are presented here, separately from the new edition of Savitri, for their intrinsic interest and as illustrations of the complexity of the process by which the poem took shape. |