Here are the beliefs and values on which I have based my life: you can take them or leave them as you please.’ If we read it in this way, it becomes moving. Its wisdom is in its ignorance.

Tagore’s late poetry becomes less and less poetry, more and more an unadorned human voice. To hear that voice we need to know the man, and that is not easy. There are readable biographies of Tagore, but they do not really break through to the human being in him. There is a nervousness about entering the sanctum, discovering the feet of clay. But I have no doubt that the better we can understand him as a man, the more clearly his very last poems will speak to us.

It is because I do not yet know Tagore well enough that I have not felt able to translate anything from his very last book, śes lekhā (Last Writings), or provide the commentary that would be required, the long history in his life and experience of every thought and line of its fifteen short poems. Or perhaps in any case they are untranslatable. Only in its own language can the voice be entirely itself. In the bewilderment, bafflement and incomprehension of his very last poems, Tagore comes nearest to us all; but language keeps him far.

He is within all

Tagore was not the only creative talent in his large family. Debendranath’s eldest son Dwijendranath was an eccentric genius, author of a long Bengali poem modelled on the Faerie Queene, inventor of shorthand in Bengali (with a manual on it in verse!) and a gifted mathematician; his second son Satyendranath was a scholar as well as the first Indian member of the Indian Civil Service, translating Sanskrit classics and Marathi poetry; his fifth son Jyotirindranath was an accomplished artist in many fields, music especially, and he had a great influence on the education and development of Tagore, who was thirteen years his junior (Jyotirindranath’s wife Kadambari was only a little older than Tagore, and they were particularly close: speculation never ceases about her tragic suicide four months after his marriage in 1883). The family was large and talented enough to provide its own cultural fare, and some of Tagore’s earliest creations were musical plays performed within the family circle. There was bālmīki pratibhā (The Genius of Vālmīki), for example, which cribbed some tunes from Moore’s Irish Melodies, heard by Tagore on his first visit to England in 1878–80.

This amateur dramatic spirit stayed with Tagore all his life: his later plays, operas and ballets were always performed first by staff and students at Santiniketan (often with Tagore himself taking a part), not on the professional Calcutta stage. I find it useful, when considering Tagore’s concept of Personality, to keep his dramatic work in mind. All his work was governed and unified by his own personality: it was as though he was the producer of a complex play lasting his whole life, bringing on different actors, sets, dances (the different genres he cultivated) as he felt inclined. It was a drama that he produced, created – yet remained outside, just as he used to sit on stage during performances of the ballets that he took round India in 1934–6, watching but not participating. In this image we have the paradox of his jīban-debatā: his sense on the one hand that his works were endlessly diverse, but on the other hand that they were all part of a unified play; that he was creatively free, always at liberty to try new things, but on the other hand at the mercy of a life-deity, a personality higher than his own, guiding him from outside. The jiban-debatā concept accounted for his dual sense of involvement in and detachment from his own creations. That same paradox he felt to be at the heart of the Universe itself; so his own creative personality was but a microcosm of the universal Personality, who was also simultaneously detached and involved; and the diversity and extravagance of his art was but a reflection of the extravagance of Nature itself.

Right from the moment that I conceived this book, I felt that Tagore’s concept of jīban-debatā would have to direct it. A selection of Tagore’s poems could never be done by committee, by trying to decide objectively which were the best or most representative. It would have to start from a vision of unity, and the choice of poems would have to be governed by the laws defining that unity. The structure of the book I therefore conceived in three parts; and these – though I did not at first realize it – would be first the poems up to the Nobel Prize in 1913; then the poems written during his years of travel and world fame; then the poems written after his illness of September 1937, when he could no longer travel. The divisions were unequal in terms of years; a little more equal in terms of books of verse (Tagore produced eleven books in his last four years). But they have a logic to them. With the three-part division established, there would have to be internal principles of selection. These were intuitive, and I find them hard to define, but the most important were contrast, balance, novelty, rhythm. Contrast is the easiest: there would have to be contrasts from one poem to the next, representing the diversity in Tagore. Balance is more difficult: the poems cannot all be entirely different from each other – there will be some that echo others, and the placing of these pairs or trios creates balance. Sometimes, searching for the next poem to translate, I would reject one because it was too near or too far from one that it echoed. Novelty was the criterion that prevented too great a similarity between any two poems: having translated one, I could not do another that was too like it – the selection had to move on, move on, with new forms, new subjects all the time, to be true to the spirit of perpetual progress in Tagore. But it had at the same time to have a cohesiveness that was more than its overall structure or its balance in selection.