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    Gitanjali
    Gitanjali
    Gitanjali
    Ebook61 pages51 minutes

    Gitanjali

    By Rabindranath Tagore

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    I have carried the manuscript of these translations with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics-- which are in the original full of subtlety, of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention-- display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. -W. B. Yeats
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateJan 18, 2013
    ISBN9781625584106
    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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    • 3/5
      Very 'ecstasy of the spirit' - I liked some of it very much but overall it's not a feeling that I relate to. I should have read it in my late teens when I was interested more in spiritual matters.
    • 5/5
      Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
      Where knowledge is free;
      Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
      Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
      Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
      Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
      Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever widening thought and action -
      Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
    • 5/5
      "Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure." Thus begins this small but rich collection of poems by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore. He sings of the ages that are the gift of the gods. He explores the abundance of human experience from birth to death and beyond. Eros has its place as well in the poems that explore the humanity of young and old. All the while the beauty of nature does not escape his attention. The author's own translation into English from the original Bengali does not lose the musical quality that must exist in the original language. One may open to almost any page to experience beautiful poetry like these line from Poem 59:"The morning light has flooded my eyes---this is thy message to my heart. Thy face is bent from above, thy eyes look down on my eyes, and my heart has touched thy feet."(p 77)With an introduction by W. B. Yeats from the original 1913 edition this is a great introduction to a protean writer. His poetry and prose compares with Goethe or Dante in its impact on both his home of India and the world.
    • 3/5
      It’s a little surprising that this is the work which captivated W.B. Yeats and led to the Nobel Prize in literature for Tagore. Many of the elements that make him great are present – his humility, reverence for the poor, and the feelings of reverie in life – but he is less poetic and more one-dimensional than in other works. This particular edition was not well edited either, containing a few typos. I would recommend “Selected Poems” or his prose work “The Home and the World” over “Gitanjali”.This was my favorite piece, poem #29 of the 103:“He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name; and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.”
    • 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 - Rabindranath Tagore

    Gitanjali

    By Rabindranath Tagore

    with an Introduction by W. B. Yeats

    Start Publishing LLC

    Copyright © 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

    First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

    Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    ISBN 978-1-62558-410-6

    Table of Contents

    Introduction

    Gitanjali

    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.’

    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,’ he said, ‘there are Gogonendranath and Abanindranath

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