| Rabindranath Tagore, one of
the greatest names in world literature, made his mark in
the West in 1912 with Gitanjali. It was a reworking in
English of 103 poems taken here and there from ten books
of his Bengali verse. (He wrote over fifty books of
verse in all.) Abandoning the vibrant lyricism of his
original tongue he discovered a deep prosaic resonance
in English, reminiscent of the Authorised Version of the
Bible. Lauded by Yeats, it at once made an extraordinary
impression everywhere in the West, and won for its
author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Of the 103 pieces over half (53) were from one of his
books alone, Gitanjali. He kept that volume’s name for
the English collection but changed the meaning of the
contents to an extent. Both books carry the sense of a
pilgrim on a quest of the spirit (Gitanjali means Song
Offerings), but Tagore’s English is prayerful more in
the Western way. It is earnest, the sense of the self
always an announcement, even at moments of deepest
renunciation. It was a remarkable adaptation. After all
this time, it is now possible for non-Bengali readers to
see what the original was like. Gitanjali in Bengali is
157 pieces of pure music, a freedom of language, an
expressive zest at the head of a light orchestra of
rhyme and assonance. The sense of the self also is
everywhere, but it is not declarative as in the English
way but simply a part of the divine play, the lila, with
which the speech-song is occupied.
Here is the original Gitanjali in full, in the light
rhymed song of which Tagore was a master, and in
English. The 157 poems make a sequence that is in effect
a statement of life and death, of journey. An
Upanishadic sense is there, of the formless divine; and
at the same time the twentieth-century man’s
existentialism, the torch on the fog of the mind. But
permeating the whole is something that goes beyond the
human limit, ananda, for which joy or delight is an
inadequate translation. It includes despair. It is of
the religious essence.
Joe Winter’s Gitanjali is published by Meteor Books,
in agreement with Anvil Press Poetry, for sale
exclusively in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri
Lanka, and in open market in all other territories
outside the European Community, U.S.A., Canada and
Australia. |
