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    Gitanjali - Song Offerings
    Gitanjali - Song Offerings
    Gitanjali - Song Offerings
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Gitanjali - Song Offerings

    By Rabindranath Tagore

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    About this ebook

    This vintage volume comprises the English translation of Rabindranath Tagore's 'Gitanjali', a collection of one-hundred-and-three poems first published by the 'India Society of London' in 1912. This beautiful collection, translated by Tagore himself, is sure to be enjoyed by a wide range of poetry-lovers, and is a veritable must-read for anyone unfamiliar with the seminal work of Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who single-handedly reformed Bengali literature and music through 'Contextual Modernism' in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Many antiquarian books such as this are increasingly rare and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this vintage book now in an affordable, modern edition complete with a new prefatory biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMay 31, 2013
    ISBN9781473389793
    Author

    Rabindranath Tagore

    Rabindranath Tagore was born in May 1861. He was a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works included numerous novels, short-stories, collection of songs, dance-drama, political and personal essays. Some prominent examples are Gitanjali (Song Offerings) , Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World). He died on 7th August 1941.

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    • 2/5
      The sites I record my books on — LibraryThing and GoodReads — are filled with glowing 5-star reviews of this work, but I'm just not feeling it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I can't remember the last time a book of poetry has left me so utterly unmoved.Perhaps something was lost in Tagore's own translation from Bengali verse to English prose-poems; perhaps it was the decision to go with heavily Biblical-sounding language, full of thees and thous and -sts; but in the end I was left with a feeling that, despite all the protestations and declarations of love and faith, that it was all very sterile — like someone writing about emotions they'd only ever been told about in passing.
    • 5/5
      When I first read this, I asked how it could be that I never had this suggested to me in any class. Of course because we tend to ignore authors who are not from Europe or America. I'd heard of Tagore, but his poetry blew me away. I keep coming back to this.
    • 5/5
      A few years ago I lost a good friend to a car accident. He was Indian and at his memorial service they read Gitanjali 96. I have to admit I was unfamiliar with Tagore at the time, but I thought it was the most beuatiful and appropriate poem I have ever heard. Tagore's poems are spiritual and mysterious without being religious, and the language is just amazingly beautiful.

    Book preview

    Gitanjali - Song Offerings - Rabindranath Tagore

    GITANJALI

    GITANJALI

    (SONG OFFERINGS)

    BY

    RABINDRANATH TAGORE

    A COLLECTION OF PROSE TRANSLATIONS

    MADE BY THE AUTHOR FROM

    THE ORIGINAL BENGALI

    WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

    W. B. YEATS

    TO

    WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN

    Contents

    Introduction

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    Index

    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 Burmah wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he wrote his first novel; and plays, written 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 aspirations 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, people even standing in the windows, but the streets were all but impassable because of the people.

    Other Indians came to see me and their reverence for this man sounded strange in our world, where we hide great and little things under the same veil of obvious comedy and half-serious depreciation. When we were making the cathedrals had we a like reverence for our great men? Every morning at three—I know, for I have seen it—one said to me, he sits immovable in contemplation, and for two hours does not awake from his reverie upon the nature of God. His father, the Maha Rishi, would sometimes sit there all through the next day; once, upon a river, he fell into contemplation because of the beauty of the landscape, and the rowers waited for eight hours before they could continue their journey. He then told me of Mr. Tagore’s family and how for generations great men have come out of its cradles. Today,

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