49)
ananta prem from mānasī, 1890
This poem can be compared with ‘Love’s Question’, but here the lover’s hyperbole is presented without irony. It is a lyric poem, not a song, but it takes us into the world of Tagore’s songs, in which love between human beings is a manifestation of divine love, and the ‘play’ (khelā, 1.13) of lovers a counterpart to the khelā of the universe. khelā is the interplay between God and his creation; between infinite, eternal Being and finite, mortal Becoming; between Perfection and the desire to become one with that Perfection: ‘Brahma is Brahma, he is the infinite ideal of perfection. But we are not what we truly are; we are ever to become true, ever to become Brahma. There is the eternal play of love in the relation between this being and the becoming; and in the depth of this mystery is the source of all truth and beauty that sustains the endless march of creation’ (S155). khelā has a dark side to it, since it separates us from God; and sometimes it stands for the vanity of life (as in 1.77 of ‘Bride’). But more often it implies creativity: for God can only express his joy through creating finite forms, just as the poet expresses his love through creating poems and songs (see S104).
Because khelā involves union and separation at the same time, these two feelings are much emphasized in Indian accounts of love. What I have translated as ‘meeting’ and ‘farewell’ in 1.14 are really the states of being together or apart, milan and biraha.
2 ‘in life after life’ – janme janme: ‘in birth after birth’. Indian concepts of karma and re-birth are involved here.
15 ‘in shapes’ – sāje: ‘in dress, garb’.
18 ‘universal life’ – nikhil prāner prīti: ‘the delight or gladness (pritī). inherent in the universal principle of life (prān)’.
The Meghadūta (p. 50)
megh-dūt from mānasī, 1890
This magnificent poem should be read in conjuction with ‘Yaksa’ and the essay on Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta that I have translated in Appendix A, as well as Kālidāsa’s masterpiece itself (see Glossary). Tagore’s poem is rhymed in couplets, but with shifting caesura and constant enjambement. The sonorous sinuosity of the verse is what I have tried to capture in my translation. The language is highly Sanskritic: its compounds and mixed metaphors pose great difficulties to the translator. A literal translation of the second sentence of the poem would read: ‘Cloud-sonorous stanzas have kept the griefs of all the many separated lovers of the universe in their own dark layers having heaped (them) into cloudy-music.’
In R73 Tagore describes the impression made on him by the sound and rhythm of Kālidāsa’s poem before he could understand ‘a word of Sanskrit’; and we also read of how rainy days had a ‘special importance’ for him as a child (R262). Love of Kālidāsa and love of rain have contributed equally to this poem. Its great theme is biraha or bicched: yearning, pining, separation: the Yaksa pining for his beloved; Kālidāsa expressing his own sense of exile (see RM166), and thus by extension expressing the byabadhān (‘gulf’, 1.116) in the heart of man. Kālidāsa’s poetry, in its beauty and artistry, was for Tagore an ideal of perfection somewhat different from the Upani
adic ideal he invoked elsewhere – extravagant not chaste, complex not simple. See the essay for the fascination that the names in the poetry had for him. But the ideal had an uneasiness about it, in the image of the Beloved doomed to an eternity of pining amidst the deathless but dead luxuriance of Alakā; and this idea is developed further in ‘Yaka’. More alive is the beauty of Bengal in the rains: a key-word is śyām, which can mean ‘black’ in Sanskrit, and is a name for Krsna, but which in Bengali usually evokes the dark green of wet, tropical vegetation. ‘In verdurous Bengal’ in 1.49 is śyām-baṅga-deśe; and ‘blue-green shadows’ in 1.51 are syām-chāyā. Tagore’s own mantra (‘spell’, 1.106, see Glossary) overlays Kālidāsa’s: his poem passes on to its readers the mukti, spiritual liberation that Tagore felt when he read Kālidāsa’s poem (11.106–10).
21 ‘with clothes disordered’ – mlān-beśe: ‘with shabby clothes’.
23 sa
gīt, the word for music here, means a union or harmony of songs.
29 ‘mountains’ – himācal: the Himalayas.
40–41 lit., ‘by swelling the stream of your verse like a rain-filled river’.
66–7 The grammar here seems to suggest that there is only one ‘village of Daśārna’, but Daśārna was the name of a region and a people in Ancient India. See Glossary.
70 ‘jasmine’ – yūthī: see Glossary.
73 ‘desperate’ – bikal: the lotuses are ‘crippled’ for (want of) the shade of the cloud.
75 ‘no coyness in their gaze’ – bhrū-bilās śekhe nāi: ‘they have not learnt bhrū-bilās, seductive eyebrow movements’.
86–7 lit., ‘into darkness so thick it can be pierced by a needle (sūci-bhedya), into the main streets, by the light of occasional flashes of lightning’. I have transferred the untranslatable needle-metaphor from the darkness to the lightning.
89–91 See Ganges in the Glossary for the legend alluded to in these lines. Lit., ‘There is Kanakhala, where Jāhnavī (Gagā), restless with youth, ignoring the jealous frown of Gaurī (Pārvatī), played with the moonlit matted locks of Dhūrjati (Śiva) with her teasing, surging foam.’
94 kāmanār moka-dhām: ‘the abode of (spiritual) release from desire’.
The Golden Boat (p. 53)
sonar tarī from sonār tarī (The Golden Boat), 1894
In 1890 Tagore’s father gave him charge of the family estates, which included land at Shelidah, by the river Padma in north Bengal. As a result, Tagore came into much closer contact with rural, riverine Bengal than he had known hitherto, and the experience inspired poems, short stories and letters. This famous and elusive poem captures much of the atmosphere of Bengal’s rivers during the monsoon. The sex of the person in the boat is indeterminate, as Bengali pronouns do not distinguish gender; but Tagore has ‘a woman at the helm’ in his own translation, so perhaps we should follow him.
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