Selected Poems Read Online

There had, through all the different types of poem and varieties of verse-form, to be a unity of rhythm.

Rhythm in this sense is impossible to describe. Tagore often referred to the underlying harmony of things in terms of rhythm: he was in no doubt that the rhythms of art – whether musical rhythms, metrical rhythms, structural rhythms or even the rhythm of line and shape that he explored in his paintings – were a reflection of rhythms in Nature and the universe which science could analyse but never communicate. So essential is rhythm to his aesthetic philosophy that I never considered anything other than a verse translation of his poems; for all the agonies and compromises that verse translation imposes, no prose translation could begin to approach Tagore.

But the rhythm we are concerned with is not just universal rhythm: it is the rhythm of Tagore’s own individuality, his own personal way of feeling and thinking. Every major artist has his own unique rhythm: it is one of the things that distinguish the major artist from the second-rate. I have tried – I cannot judge whether I have succeeded – to achieve a unity of rhythm in these translations. They are meant to be read aloud. If anyone does so, I hope that he or she will find that there is a connecting and unifying rhythm running through them all. It may not be Tagore’s rhythm – how can it be, completely, in another language? But if rhythm is there at all, then I shall have achieved something.

He is outside all

On 24 August 1930, Tagore wrote from Geneva to William Rothenstein, who had been his regular correspondent since 1912. The wry, self-mocking tone of the letter is typical of Tagore’s epistolary style; but it also contains a most revealing antithesis:

Very dear friend

To be reconciled to the inevitable with good grace is wisdom, so let me in a spirit of resignation accept the fact that you must have an undisturbed opportunity to produce your pictures while I nourish a desperate hope in my mind to find some rest somewhere in the closely-knit days which hold me captive – and to play truant to all obligations that are compulsory. The rich luxury of leisure is not for me while I am in Europe – I am doomed to be unrelentingly good to humanity and remain harnessed to a cause. The artist in me ever urges me to be naughty and natural – but it requires [a] good deal of courage to be what I truly am. Then again I do not really know myself and dare not play tricks with my nature. So the good for nothing artist must have for his bed-fellow the man of a hundred good intentions.

In Germany my pictures have found a very warm welcome which was far beyond my expectations. Five of them have got their permanent place in [the] Berlin National Gallery, and several invitations have come from other centres for their exhibition. This has a strange analogy with the time which followed the Gitanjali publication – it is sudden and boisterous like a hill stream after a storm and like the same casual flood may disappear with the same emphasis of suddenness. With love

Ever yours

Rabindranath Tagore

In this Introduction I have often identified the ‘he’ of my quotation from the āśā Upanisad with Tagore himself – a sleight of hand that may arouse suspicions about my personal attitude to Tagore, but which is not, however, at odds with his philosophy or with Indian philosophical tradition generally, which has frequently striven to identify God with man, Brahman with Ätman (soul). But in this final section the sage’s intended meaning must stand. It is that God exists outside his creation; in that sense, to those who are part of his creation, he is unreachable.

I have already spoken of Tagore’s sense of the ‘farness’ of his ideal: but that is a feeling that goes hand in hand with his sense of its nearness in the real, observable and perceptible beauty of Nature, human love and children. I am now concerned with something rather different: the feeling that Nature and human creativity lie essentially outside and separate from God; that the Goodness, the Beauty and the Harmony of God may have nothing to do with the autonomous processes of Nature, and that therefore the artist’s creativity is likewise amoral, arbitrary, fanciful, whimsical, unreal. This is the suspicion that Tagore voices in his letter to Rothenstein: that the true, natural artist in him was ‘naughty’, ‘good for nothing’, essentially separate from the idealist and moralist in him, ‘the man of a hundred good intentions’. I have quoted the whole letter, because it was in the paintings that the naughty artist in Tagore was indeed freest, unimpeded and unrestrained by his equally strong moral impulse. This is why the paintings – nearly three thousand of them – are such a puzzle to so many. They are hit-and-miss, amateurish in their technique – but that is not the trouble, for Tagore glorified amateurism in many fields. It is rather their apparent impishness, their revelry in the odd, the grotesque, the meaningless. What have they to do with the author of Gitanjali or The Religion of Man?

The element in Tagore that found its clearest and most unfettered expression in his paintings was always present in him: it accounts for the equivocal tones in his writing, some of which I have tried to define in my notes to the poems. Tagore’s ideal of beauty can be equivocal: in the imagery of the heavenly city of Alakā, taken from Kālidāsa, the poet whom he admired more than any other, with its birahiī (separated Beloved) condemned to immortality, there is sterility – its very perfection is inhuman and therefore alien. The jīban-debatā can be equivocal too: all too often it is udāsīn, detached, indifferent to human feeling and concern – Tagore expressed the pain of rejection by an indifferent jīban-debatā in countless songs. Nature itself, for all its beauties, can seem udāsīn as well: poems such as ‘Earth’ and ‘In the Eyes of a Peacock’ present a picture of natural processes aloof from human concerns. Above all Tagore’s notion of khelā, the endless playfulness of the universe, is equivocal: though it is a source of joy, and is revealed to us in the play of young children, it also has a dark side; it is the vanity and meaninglessness of life, it is māyā, the illusion and ignorance to which – according to the cruellest strain in Indian religion and philosophy – we are all, as mortal creatures, perpetually condemned, perpetually cut off as we are from the reality of God, the ideal, the infinite, the eternal.

If the processes of Nature and Art are separate from God, cannot God be dropped from the picture altogether? Should Goodness, Harmony, Unity be dismissed as fictions? I do not know enough to say whether these questions were in Tagore’s mind at the end of his life, while the world collapsed into war; but some of his last works seem to hint at them. When I finished my translations, at Santiniketan in the spring of 1982, I chose to stop with a poem in which the naughty artist, rather than the idealist or the moralist, is to the fore.