Gitanjali - Song Offerings
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Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian poet, composer, philosopher, and painter from Bengal. Born to a prominent Brahmo Samaj family, Tagore was raised mostly by servants following his mother’s untimely death. His father, a leading philosopher and reformer, hosted countless artists and intellectuals at the family mansion in Calcutta, introducing his children to poets, philosophers, and musicians from a young age. Tagore avoided conventional education, instead reading voraciously and studying astronomy, science, Sanskrit, and classical Indian poetry. As a teenager, he began publishing poems and short stories in Bengali and Maithili. Following his father’s wish for him to become a barrister, Tagore read law for a brief period at University College London, where he soon turned to studying the works of Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. In 1883, Tagore returned to India to marry and manage his ancestral estates. During this time, Tagore published his Manasi (1890) poems and met the folk poet Gagan Harkara, with whom he would work to compose popular songs. In 1901, having written countless poems, plays, and short stories, Tagore founded an ashram, but his work as a spiritual leader was tragically disrupted by the deaths of his wife and two of their children, followed by his father’s death in 1905. In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first lyricist and non-European to be awarded the distinction. Over the next several decades, Tagore wrote his influential novel The Home and the World (1916), toured dozens of countries, and advocated on behalf of Dalits and other oppressed peoples.
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Reviews for Gitanjali - Song Offerings
8 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The sites I record my books on — LibraryThing and GoodReads — are filled with glowing 5-star reviews of this work, but I'm just not feeling it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I can't remember the last time a book of poetry has left me so utterly unmoved.Perhaps something was lost in Tagore's own translation from Bengali verse to English prose-poems; perhaps it was the decision to go with heavily Biblical-sounding language, full of thees and thous and -sts; but in the end I was left with a feeling that, despite all the protestations and declarations of love and faith, that it was all very sterile — like someone writing about emotions they'd only ever been told about in passing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When I first read this, I asked how it could be that I never had this suggested to me in any class. Of course because we tend to ignore authors who are not from Europe or America. I'd heard of Tagore, but his poetry blew me away. I keep coming back to this.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A few years ago I lost a good friend to a car accident. He was Indian and at his memorial service they read Gitanjali 96. I have to admit I was unfamiliar with Tagore at the time, but I thought it was the most beuatiful and appropriate poem I have ever heard. Tagore's poems are spiritual and mysterious without being religious, and the language is just amazingly beautiful.
Book preview
Gitanjali - Song Offerings - Rabindranath Tagore
GITANJALI
GITANJALI
(SONG OFFERINGS)
BY
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
A COLLECTION OF PROSE TRANSLATIONS
MADE BY THE AUTHOR FROM
THE ORIGINAL BENGALI
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
W. B. YEATS
TO
WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN
Contents
Introduction
II
III
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Index
INTRODUCTION
A FEW days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.
It seemed to him natural that I should be moved, for he said, I read Rabindranath every day, to read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.
I said, An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you. For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new Renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.
He answered, We have other poets, but none that are his equal; we call this the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burmah wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he wrote his first novel; and plays, written when he was but little older, are still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the completeness of his life; when he was very young he wrote much of natural objects, he would sit all day in his garden; from his twenty-fifth year or so to his thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a great sorrow, he wrote the most beautiful love poetry in our language
; and then he said with deep emotion, words can never express what I owed at seventeen to his love poetry. After that his art grew deeper, it became religious and philosophical; all the aspirations of mankind are in his hymns. He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.
I may have changed his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought. A little while ago he was to read divine service in one of our churches—we of the Brahma Samaj use your word ‘church’ in English—it was the largest in Calcutta and not only was it crowded, people even standing in the windows, but the streets were all but impassable because of the people.
Other Indians came to see me and their reverence for this man sounded strange in our world, where we hide great and little things under the same veil of obvious comedy and half-serious depreciation. When we were making the cathedrals had we a like reverence for our great men? Every morning at three—I know, for I have seen it
—one said to me, he sits immovable in contemplation, and for two hours does not awake from his reverie upon the nature of God. His father, the Maha Rishi, would sometimes sit there all through the next day; once, upon a river, he fell into contemplation because of the beauty of the landscape, and the rowers waited for eight hours before they could continue their journey.
He then told me of Mr. Tagore’s family and how for generations great men have come out of its cradles. Today,