These conversations of 1957 and 1958 were spoken by the Mother in French and appear here in English translation. All of them were tape-recorded. Passages from some of these conversations were published in the French original with an English translation in issues of the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education between 1957 and 1963. In 1973 a new English translation of all the conversations was brought out as a book entitled Questions and Answers 1957 & 1958. The same book, with minor revisions of the translation, was published in 1977 under the title Questions and Answers 1957–58 as Volume 9 of the Collected Works of the Mother (first edition). The present volume, which is part of the second edition of the Collected Works of the Mother, has the same text as the first edition, except for some minor revisions of the translation.
Passages from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are sometimes quoted in the text and footnotes. The sources of these works are the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, (SABCL) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), second edition.