Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath)

RABINDRANATH TAGORE: SELECTED POEMS

RABINDRANATH TAGORE was born in 1861, into one of the foremost families of Bengal. He was the fourteenth child of Debendranath Tagore, who headed the Brahmo Samaj (a Hindu reform movement). The family house at Jorasanko in Calcutta was a hive of cultural and intellectual activity. Tagore was educated by private tutors, and first visited Europe in 1878. He started writing at an early age, and his talent was recognized by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the leading writer of the day. In the 1890s Tagore lived mainly in rural East Bengal, managing family estates. In the early 1900s he was involved in the svadeśī campaign against the British, but withdrew when the movement turned violent. In 1912 he came to England with Gitanjali, an English translation of some of his religious lyrics. It was acclaimed by W. B. Yeats and later published by Macmillan, leading directly to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. In the 1920s and 1930s he made extensive lecture tours of America, Europe and the Far East. Proceeds from these tours, and from his Western publications, went to Visva-Bharati, the school and international university he created at Santiniketan, a hundred miles north-west of Calcutta.

Tagore was a controversial figure at home and abroad: at home because of his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama and music; abroad because of the stand he took against militarism and nationalism. In 1919 he protested against the Amritsar Massacre by returning the knighthood that the British had given him in 1915. He was close to Mahatma Gandhi, who called him the ‘Great Sentinel’ of modern India; but he generally held himself aloof from politics. His own translations (Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, 1936) have not proved sufficient to sustain the worldwide reputation he enjoyed in his lifetime; but as a Bengali writer his eminence is unchallenged. His works run to thirty-two large volumes. They contain some sixty collections of verse; novels such as Gora and The Home and the World; experimental plays such as The Post Office and Red Oleanders; and essays on a host of religious, social and literary topics. He also wrote over 2,000 songs, which have become the national music of Bengal, and include the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. Late in life he took up painting, exhibiting in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London and New York. He died in 1941.

WILLIAM RADICE was born in 1951 in London. He has pursued a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has written or edited nearly thirty books. In addition to his translations of Tagore for Penguin, his publications include eight books of his own poems, Teach Yourself Bengali (1994), Myths and Legends of India (2001) and A Hundred Letters from England (2003). He has also translated from German (Martin Kämpchen’s The Honey-Seller and Other Stories, 1995, and Sigfrid Gauch’s autobiographical novel Traces of My Father, 2002) and Italian (Puccini’s Turandot for English National Opera). He wrote the libretto for Param Vir’s Tagore-based chamber opera Snatched by the Gods (1992). He has contributed regularly to BBC radio, has lectured widely in South Asia, North America and Europe, and has been given literary prizes in India and Bangladesh.

William Radice is Senior Lecturer in Bengali at SOAS, University of London, and from 1999 to 2002 was Head of the Departments of South and South East Asia. He lives in London and Northumberland.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Selected Poems

Translated by WILLIAM RADICE

BookishMall.com

Dedicated to the Peace Movement and to E. P. Thompson (1924–1993)

BookishMall.com

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in Penguin Books 1985

Reprinted with revisions 1987

Reprinted with revisions 1993

Reprinted with a new Preface and an additional Appendix 1994

Reprinted with a new Preface, Further Reading and corrections in Penguin Classics 2005

Translation, Introduction, Notes, Glossary and Further Reading

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101491362

Preface to the 2005 Edition

This book is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary, and I present it this time without any apologia. In the first edition of 1985 I was nervously presenting my work for the first time, aware of those before me who had fallen short, and wondering if my own attempts to present and translate Rabindranath Tagore would be any more successful.

Sub Total :	$0.00
Total :	$0.00

Your cart is currently empty.

MY ACCOUNT

Selected Poems Read Online

Contents

Preface to the 2005 Edition

1 comment

Leave a comment

Search

Genres

Authors

Most Loved Genres

Popular Authors

Useful Links