I had the good fortune of having lived close to Swamiji for nearly forty years since my childhood. Dogri has inherited a new experience through his poetry to which he devoted himself in the last years of his life.
I am grateful to the Sahitya Akademi for giving me an opportunity to write on his life and work. I have no pretensions to writing in English and I have tried my best to make the narrative as objective as possible so that his life could be presented independently of our personal relationship.
Translating poetry has been difficult. The nature of poetic sensibility has a direct relationship with a language and some lines which are inspiring and ecstatic in one language may show hardly any refinement in a translated form. Similarly, the emotional intensity of one language group may differ from other groups. I have tried to present selections from Swamiji which I felt could represent him with the least corruption. But I must admit my own failings as a translator.
Swamiji's poetical works are like the continuous strike, wave after wave, of the roaring rhetorical arguments and illustrations from the vast ocean of his experience on the shores of the reader's mind. There is a persuasive emotion pervading in it, the intensity of which may be felt everywhere. It has, therefore, been rather difficult to prefer the more beautiful to the more appropriate stanzas to illustrate the text of this book. In several cases, I had to resort to quote in original Dogri. I have also cited some texts from Sanskrit poets. Therefore, I have given a transliteration table to help in reading the Dogri, Hindi and Sanskrit excerpts in the Roman script, which is hardly adequate to express the Indian sounds.
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