Largest single anthology of Tagore's translations in English

Updated on: Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Nominated as the 'Book of the Year 2011', 'The Essential Tagore', a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on his 150th birth anniversary, is the largest single anthology of Tagore's works in English and has been acclaimed by critics as a path-breaking exercise.

Co-edited by Bangladeshi writer and translator Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, a Delhi-based writer, translator and professor, the 900-page book has been published by the Harvard University Press.

The book has been proposed as the 'Book of the Year' by eminent Western philospher, writer and critic Martha Nussbaum in the New Statesman published on November 21, 2011. The New Statesman seeks nominations every year from eminent persons for the best book of the year.

Radha Chakravarty, a Tagore translator of repute, says the nomination is significant as it is "unusual" that a non contemporary writer whose books were written 150 years ago should be considered relevant even today for nomination.

The nomination is also "unusual" considering that the work does not fit into either fiction or non-fiction category and has been translated by a cross-section of authors in India and Bangladesh. Radha Chakravarty had previously translated several Tagore works into English including, "Gora", "Choker Bali", "Farewell Song" and "The Land of Cards: Stories, Poems and Plays for Children".

Her book "Tagore and the Modern Novel" will be published in 2012. The South Asia edition of the book has been published by Visva-Bharati University and priced at Rs 1,500. Harvard, which holds the international rights, has priced its edition at approx USD 39. The voluminous work covering 10 genres seeks to reappraise Tagore's legacy from a 21st century point of view in an idiom relevant to the modern day reader.

With a foreword written by litterateur Amit Chaudhuri, it introduces Tagore to the international and non-Bengali reader through modern translations and some of the poet's own English writings. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in the New Republic described the book as a "fine selection of Tagore's writings... with an
imaginative and original foreword by the excellent writer Amit Chaudhuri".

The book seeks to transcend the stock approach to Tagore's translations. "We have tried to look beyond the Bengali stereotype of Tagore as the revered 'Gurudev', and the popular Western perception of him as the mystic prophet from the East," Chakravarty told PTI.

Booker prize winner Aravind Adiga wrote, "The new anthology is very welcome because it starts the process of freeing Tagore for a contemporary audience. The first thing that strikes you about 'The Essential Tagore' is the persity of its subject's talents."

The book covers multple genres - autobiography, prose, poetry, drama, songs, novels, stories, humour, letters and travel writing - intended to reflect Tagore's versatility and the evolution of his creativity.

Literary figures of international repute such as Amitava Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri and Sunetra Gupta are among the 30 contributors. "In our attempt to seek out the 'essential Tagore', we have tried to address his core concerns, while also paying attention to his development as a thinker and creative writer; and to the external circumstances and inner complusions that drove him to experiment with ever-new forms of expression," Chakravarty said.

While some of the articles are well-known, efforts have been made to include less familiar writings. The anthology includes three poems originally omitted from the published version of the English 'Gitanjali' and 'Pushpanjali' that have not been translated before.

The Humour section draws attention to Tagore's comic genius which scholars tend to ignore. The prose section includes previously untranslated items from 'Byadhi O Pratikar', 'Raja O Proja' and 'Rashtraniti O Dharmaniti'. The new anthology is a break from the straitjacketed translations published during Tagore's lifetime and subsequent translations made under the copyright rules of Visva-Bharati.

The lapse of copyright has led to a mushrooming of Tagore translations but the new found freedom has often produced works of uneven quality. Chakravarty says, "It was important for us, therefore, to access this freedom with a great sense of responsibility, in order to promote a variety of approaches without compromising on quality."

Stylistically, the translators have adopted modern day English usage with multiple approaches retaining some Bengali terms to reflect the subtle cultural nuances that figure in the nobel laureate's works.

In a couple of instances, we have used multiple translations of the same song or poem, to show how versatile modern Tagore translations can be, and how closely translation is tied to interpretation", Chakravarty says.

Largest single anthology of Tagore's translations in English

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