The talks in this volume were given between December 1950 and May 1951. The earliest ones were noted down by hand, but most were recorded on a dictating machine and then transcribed. They were first published in an incomplete form in French and English in the quarterly Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. Extracts from ten talks appeared in various issues between 1957 and 1959; the rest, with four exceptions, were serialised in chronological order in the issues between November 1963 and February 1967.
The first complete edition of the original French text was published in 1967 under the title Entretiens 1950–51. A complete English translation, entitled Questions and Answers 1950–51, was brought out in 1972. That translation, with a few minor revisions, was reprinted in the same year as Volume 4 of the Collected Works of the Mother (first edition). The present text is the same as that of the first edition, with the exception of a few minor revisions of the translation. The quoted passages from the texts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are taken from the Centenary editions of their works.