jc_hall's Full Review: Rabindranath Tagore - Selected Poems: Rabindrath T...
Selected Poems
Rabindranath Tagore
Translated by William Radice
My anniversary’s coming up and while trying to think of a present for my husband, I thought back to the poem I had chosen to be read out on our wedding day. At the time, Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore seemed to encompass all we meant to each other, its imagery evoking a timelessness that gave deeper meaning to the forever part of the wedding vow. More, the last stanza has a poignant immediacy that played well to the inherent drama of the day.
In the notes near the end of ‘Selected Poems--Rabindranath Tagore’, William Radice explains that Unending Love ‘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 of lovers a counterpart to the khela (interplay between God and his creation) of the universe.'
Radice goes on to explain the intricacies of khela—‘khela has a dark side to it, since it separates us from God, and sometimes it stands for the vanity of life. 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. Because khela involves union and separation at the same time, the two feelings are much emphasized in Indian accounts of love. What I have translated as ‘meeting’ and ‘farewell’ are really the states of being together and apart…’
For each of four dozen poems, Radice has compiled such detailed notes, many of which exceed the length of the poems themselves. As with Unending Love, he delves into Bengali culture and folklore, and gives literal translations of words or phrases with which he had taken poetic licence. There is an exhaustive 16-page glossary at the very end of the book, behind the notes, listing Bengali/Indian words found in the poems (proper names of mythological characters, places, plants, mountains and rivers, palaces, etc.) The poems are listed chronologically and often Radice attempts to correlate them with the life of their creator and, not least, with Tagore’s beliefs as set out in his five main books of English lectures.
As can be seen at a glance from a list of dates charting important episodes in his life, Rabindranath (‘Lord of the Sun’) Tagore lived through interesting times. Born in Calcutta to a prosperous and educated Brahmin family, his childhood and precocious adolescence were spent in his beloved Bengal. His prolific writings were published and performed within his very talented extended family. He visited England, consorted with the literati of the time, charming Yeats who claimed that Tagore’s poetry ‘stirred my blood as nothing has for years’. Both the Bengalese and English versions of his most famous work, ‘Gitanjali’, were published. It was for ‘Gitanjali’ that he was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1913. A knighthood was conferred upon him soon after, an honour he famously returned four years later in protest of the Amritsar Massacre.
Tagore took an interest in politics (both within India and abroad) and travelled all over the world. He was invited to lecture in Europe, Asia and America, where he preached a kind of idealistic humanitarianism, abhorring all kinds of prejudice and bigotry. He was an innovator in education, created new forms and styles in poetry, drama, opera, and ballet, and took up painting in his old age.
His legacy includes over one thousand poems, eight volumes of short stories, two dozen works of drama, eight novels as well as books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. However, he is most probably best known and best loved for his music. He composed over two thousand songs, both music and lyrics. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. No other poet is as widely loved as Tagore and few command a place in the hearts and minds of the Bengali people.
In the Preface, Radice tells how Tagore’s poems have come to life in performances, variously by English schoolboys who enact ‘The Hero’and other Tagore poems now found in school poetry anthology, a Bengali dancer who dances to Radice’s recitation of Tagore poems in a programme called ‘Dancing Poetry’, and composers who have done settings of ‘Brahma, Vismu, Siva’ and ‘The Conch’ for unaccompanied voices. Radice himself wrote the libretto for Param Vir’s chamber opera ‘Snatched by the Gods’, commissioned for the Munich Biennade and premiering in Amsterdam and Munich in a production for the Netherlands Opera.
Tagore would be pleased, for he said that his songs would be remembered when all his other works were forgotten. He likened a song without its melody to a butterfly whose wings have been plucked and he was reluctant to publish the lyrics of his songs for that reason.
Radice is of a like mind, disbelieving that one can translate songs, and none of the poems in this book are songs. ‘Ambitious and intelligent though his prose was, daring and original though his drama was, endlessly varied and inventive though his poetry was, Tagore’s genius showed itself most naturally and faultlessly in his songs.’ And most likely, as Radice implies, Tagore’s songs are most accessible to his own people.
Nevertheless, there is a lyricism and beauty in Tagore’s poetry that speaks just as candidly to the human heart. Radice knows this; as he says in his closing of a wonderfully insightful and erudite introduction: ‘Poetry is impossible without Love: that is what I hope will emerge most strongly than anything else from the poems that follow.’
His choice of, as much as his translation of, Tagore’s poems, has made his attempt more than merely successful. It has made it a veritable tour de force, one that no translator (of prose or poetry) should ignore. For Radice has shown that, not until you know your subject and his body of work better perhaps than the subject knows himself, you have no business attempting to translate an author’s work. Radice, for one, has succeeded admirably. Highly recommended for anyone with a love for poetry.
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