GITANJALI

Song Offerings
A collection of prose translations
made by the author from
the original Bengali
With an introduction by
W. B. YEATS
to WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN

---

INTRODUCTION
A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, `I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.' It seemed to him natural that I should be moved, for he said, `I read Rabindranath every day, to read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.' I said, `An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you. For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.' He answered, `We have other poets, but none that are his equal; we call this the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he wrote his first novel; and plays when he was but little older, are still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the completeness of his life; when he was very young he wrote much of natural objects, he would sit all day in his garden; from his twenty-fifth year or so to his thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a great sorrow, he wrote the most beautiful love poetry in our language'; and then he said with deep emotion, `words can never express what I owed at seventeen to his love poetry. After that his art grew deeper, it became religious and philosophical; all the inspiration of mankind are in his hymns. He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' I may have changed his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought. `A little while ago he was to read divine service in one of our churches---we of the Brahma Samaj use your word `church' in English---it was the largest in Calcutta and not only was it crowded, but the streets were all but impassable because of the people.'

Rabindranath Tagore was a global phenomenon, so why is he neglected?
Is his poetry any good? The answer for anyone who can't read Bengali must be: don't know. No translation is up to the job
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/07/rabindranath-tagore-why-was-he-neglected

Rabindranath Tagore became the embodiment of how the west wanted to see the east. Photograph: Hulton Archive
Rabindranath Tagore was born 150 years ago today. This weekend festivities and seminars are being held in his honour across the world. In London, the BFI is hosting a season of films inspired by his work; last night his fellow Bengali (and fellow Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen gave a talk at the British Museum; a two-day conference at the University of London will, among other things, examine his legacy in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.

I consulted two dictionaries of quotations, the Oxford and Penguin, to check the most memorable lines of this poet, novelist, essayist, song and short story writer. Not a single entry. They skipped from Tacitus to Hippolyte Taine as if there was nothing in Tagore's collected works (28 thick books, even with his 2,500 songs published separately) that ever had stuck in anyone's mind, or was so pithily expressed that it deserved to; as if what had come out of Tagore's pen was a kind of oriental ectoplasm, floating high above our materialist western heads, and ungraspable. In fact, I could remember one line clearly enough, and vaguely remember a whole stanza. The first is how he described the Taj Mahal: like "a teardrop on the face of eternity". The second is the inscription Wilfred Owen's mother found in her dead son's pocketbook: "When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable." But I owe this knowledge to (a) a tourist guide in Agra, and (b) to a biography. Reading Tagore himself had nothing to do with it.

‘BAUL’ AND THE IDEA OF NATION IN RABINDRANATH WITH REFERENCE TO ‘GORA’:A SUBALTERN CASE STUDY Jeanne Openshaw in her seminal ‗Seeking Bauls of Bengal‘ rightly observes that the bauls: ‘While on theone hand they are … romanticized, on the other they are demonized.‘‘ Their antipathy to caste system andoverlapping the boundaries of natural order and involvement into sexual ritual practices makes them typicalaboriginals of Bengal. Early sources dating back to the 1870s project a negative view of the bauls as low casteentertainer and bairagis belonging to different sects.

Writings:

Tagore and Theosophy:

In this writing I will be shaking/deconstructing the foundations of my own beliefs in my examination of the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore, (and his philosophy/school), and Theosophy. My primary motive for doing this came when I realized the eerie similarities between the tenets of Luciferian Theosophy and Tagore's humanist “religion of man.”

Firstly, it should be known that Tagore has occupied a special place in my heart for some time now. I was in Bangladesh, Tagore's native land, in 2005 for six months. While I was there I kept hearing the name Tagore uttered, but never bothered looking into the man, or what he'd done. It wasn't until early 2008 that I saw a documentary on his life by Satyajit Ray, (which you can watch on Google Video I believe? It's a ~50 minute documentary). Tagore was a philosopher, poet/writer, humanitarian, educator, and diplomat. He was the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His influence on the 20th century is largely ignored by most.

PREFACE

THE chapters included in this book, which comprises the Hibbert Lectures delivered in Oxford, at Manchester College, during the month of May 1930, contain also the gleanings of my thoughts on the same subject from the harvest of many lectures and addresses delivered in different countries of the world over a considerable period of my life.

The fact that one theme runs through all only proves to me that the Religion of Man has been growing within my mind as a religious experience and not merely as a philosophical subject In fact, a very large portion of my writings, beginning from the earlier products of my immature youth down to the present time, carry an almost continuous trace of the history of this growth. To-day I am made conscious of the fact that the works that I have started and the words that I have uttered are deeply linked by a unity of inspiration whose proper definition has often remained un-revealed to me.

In the present volume I offer the evidence of my own personal life brought into a definite focus. To some of my readers this will supply matter of psychological interest; but for others I hope it will carry with It its own ideal value important for such a subject as religion.

NOTE ON THE NATURE OF REALITY (A conversation between Rabindranath Tagore and Professor Albert Einstein, in the afternoon of July 14, 1930, at the Professor's residence in Kaputh.)

E. : Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?
T. : Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the truth of the Universe is human truth. I have taken a scientific fact to illustrate this Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their inter-connection of human relationship, which gives living solidarity to man's world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.
E. : There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (i) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.
T. : When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.

E,: This is a purely human conception of the universe.
T.: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.

E.: This is a realization of the human entity.
T. : Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realize the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of truths. Religion realizes these truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to truth, and we know truth as good through our own harmony with it.