Gitanjali

310 Pages·2011·1.81 MB·English

by  Rabindranath Tagore

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Gitanjali
Song Offerings
a new translation
by
William Radice
with an Introduction
and a new text of Tagore’s translation based on his manuscript
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Gitanjali Reborn
A Note on the Texts
Gitanjali: Song Offerings
a new translation alternating with a new text of Tagore’s translation
Additional Poems
Appendix A: Tables 1, 2 & 3
the manuscript sequence
source books
chronological order of the Additional Poems
Appendix B: Facsimiles
from the Rothenstein manuscript
from the Crescent Moon Sheaf
Appendix C: Gitanjali: Song Offerings
W.B. Yeats’s Introduction
the Macmillan text
Appendix D: The Rothenstein Manuscript versus the Macmillan Text
table 4, with notes
Appendix E: ‘I Shall Stand’
by John W. Rattray
Indexes
index to the new translation
index to the new text of Tagore’s translation
index to the Macmillan text
Copyright Page
to
the many people in India and Britain who helped me to complete this
book
with special thanks to
Dr Manas Kumar Bhattacharya, Professor D.P. Baksi and
Dr Debadyuti Baksi (orthopaedic surgeons),
Dr Deepa Banerjee (anaesthesiologist), and
Mr Ayananta Dalal (physiotherapist) tomār sonār thālāy sājāba āj dukher
aśrudhār
(Gitanjali 80/83)
In green India among quiet
trees that bend over blue water
lives Tagore …
‘In Green India’, in Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Srečko
Kosovel,
translated by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson
Introduction
These poems of mine are very different from other literary productions of the kind.
They are revelations of my true self to me. The literary man was a mere amanuensis—
very often knowing nothing of the true meaning of what he was writing …
Letter from Rabindranath Tagore to William
Rothenstein, 30 December 1912
1.
A new translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s most famous book Gitanjali
seems timely because of three consecutive anniversaries. 2011 is the
one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Tagore’s birth in 1861. 2012 is
the centenary of the publication of Tagore’s own translation of Gitanjali.
2013 is the centenary of the Nobel Prize that followed directly from the
unprecedented success of the book. In terms too of the direction that
literary studies have taken in recent decades a new translation of
Gitanjali seems in keeping with the Zeitgeist. A brilliant book by Tagore’s
compatriot Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Metaphysics of Text (2010) charts the
increasing sensitivity of scholars to the indeterminacy of texts: the ‘real’
or ‘definitive’ text of a literary work being difficult to define, and its
identity being inseparable from its reception history or ‘afterlife’.
Gitanjali had a most extraordinary afterlife, which through numerous
secondary translations continues to expand and develop. But what made
Gitanjali unique was its lack of a precise ‘original’. There are examples in
world literature of works whose originals have been lost and which have
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only survived in translation. But it is hard to think of any other case of
a writer conceiving a work in translation without a precisely defined
source.
In 1910 Tagore published a Bengali book called Gitanjali. It consists of
157 lyric poems, many of which are songs. It was followed by Gitimalya
(1914) and Gitali (1914). It is convenient to refer to the three books
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together as ‘the Gitanjali phase’, to which also belonged the plays Raja
(1910) and Dakghar (1912, translated as ‘The Post Office’, 1914). The
English Gitanjali with its subtitle ‘Song Offerings’ overlaps with the
Bengali Gitanjali by just over half: 53 of its 103 poems are from the
Bengali Gitanjali. The remaining poems come from ten other books
which mostly do not belong to the Gitanjali phase as such. Diverse
though these sources are, I would say that the English Gitanjali is derived
from three types of poem. There are song-like poems of the Gitanjali
phase proper; there are intricate, sometimes sensuous, sometimes austere
sonnets that Tagore published in Naibedya (‘Offerings’, 1901), including
what in India has become his most famous poem of all—‘Where the
mind is without fear and the head is held high’ (No. 35); and there are
lighter, ballad-like poems from Kheya (‘The Ferry’, 1906).
Would-be translators of Gitanjali, therefore, have two options. Either
they can do a new translation of the Bengali Gitanjali, or they can
attempt a retranslation of all the poems that are in the English Gitanjali.
The first option has already been taken by Brother James Talarovic in
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1983, and by Joe Winter in 1998. In the present book I have chosen
the second, more audacious option. Audacious it certainly is, because
Tagore’s own translations of these poems have acquired a classic status;
they were the basis of his international reputation, and his Nobel Prize
in 1913 was given specifically for Gitanjali (with some mention too of its
follow-up volume The Gardener) and not for his achievements as a poet
in Bengali.
In his book, Sukanta Chaudhuri discusses the media by which texts
can be transmitted, whether manuscript, print or electronic, and how,
with any work of literature, ‘this material embodiment affects the
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signifying function of the text’. The English Gitanjali’s material
embodiment, first as a limited edition published by the India Society in
London in November 1912 and then by Macmillan in March 1913, was
profoundly affected by W.B. Yeats’s passionate and influential