Rabindranath Tagore

Gitanjali (Song Offerings)

London, The Indian Society, 1912.

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As an undergraduate, I became a devoted reader of Tagore in English translation, and gradually built up a modest collection of the beautiful Macmillan translations that were published in the years following his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. I lapped up anything I could find about the great man, especially Krishna Kripalani’s 1962 biography, and I was intrigued by the close-yet-distant parallels between the respective missions of Tagore and Gandhi. Pride of place in my book collection was held by a rare first edition of Gitanjali, the Nobel winner: it was published in a limited edition of 750 copies, 500 of which were reserved for members of The Indian Society, with only 250 being released for public sale. I found a copy in 1972 in the dusty back room of Probsthain’s Oriental Booksellers, opposite the British Museum; then more recently — just a couple of years ago, feeling guilty at hoarding it, I gave it to the Regenstein Library at Chicago in thanks for their sublime Digital South Asia Library project from which all South Asia scholars benefit so richly every day.

Gitanjali must be one of the most written-about of all Tagore’s works, and it is famously quite far from the Bengali originals — though I have to take this on trust, as my own knowledge of Bengali never (yet) got to a level where I could test the theory for myself. In fact there were two books of Tagore’s that obsessed me most: alongside Gitanjali was Tagore’s translations (‘assisted by Evelyn Underhill’) of Kabir. My professors taught me to look down on this Kabir collection as being inauthentic, but when I came to make my own

judgement on the issue I saw that the words “authenticity” and “Kabir” hardly belong in the same sentence anyway, and that there are as many Kabirs out there as there are listeners to hear them. Here is an example of the diction that I fell for in Tagore’s Englished Kabir: marked by a Psalm-like use of parallelisms, and a lookalike King James diction, the poetry fitted well into my presuppositions of what religious verse should sound like:

XXXI

II. 100. niś din sālai ghāw

A sore pain troubles me day and night, and I cannot sleep;I long for the meeting with my Beloved, and my father’s house gives me pleasure no more.

The gates of the sky are opened, the temple is revealed:I meet with my husband, and leave at His feet the offering of my body and my mind.

Encountering Tagore’s English Kabir before encountering Tagore’s English Tagore in Gitanjali, I read the latter through the lens of the former.

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I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat. In thy world I have no work to do;my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose. When the hour strikes for thy silentworship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing. When in the morning air the goldenharp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.

William Rothenstein’s elegant portrait of Tagore in the frontispiece of the first-edition Gitanjali showed him to be the most perfect and beautiful sage; only later did I notice that Epstein’s almost equally-famous bust of the poet

actually has him resting on that great prophetic beard. In any case I was happy to sign up for bardolatry and to add a name to my list of literary heroes; and this was the blithely appreciative mood in which I encountered Tagore. My

reading of Gitanjali was aided and abetted by Yeats’ Introduction, in which he famously wrote: “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses or in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.”

Coming back to Gitanjali now, I find the magical resonance of its famous words still intact; it seems like a homecoming.

Rupert Snell — HINDIDOX