Rabindranath Tagore:

An Introduction
 Introduction
• A Bengali poet, story writer, playwright, essayist and artist.
• His role in introducing the best form of Indian culture to the West and
introducing the highest form of western culture to India was immense.
• Rabindranath was born in an affluent family on 7 May, 1861 in Kolkata.
• father, Devendranath Tagore and mother, Sharada Devi.
• He was a multi talented individual who was attracted to various forms
of art literature, poetry, dance and music.
• In the later part of the 1960s, he began his pursuit of painting. This was
an expansion of his personality as a poet.
Introduction
• He was born in 1861 and died in1941.
• In a career spanning more than six decades, he wrote poems, songs, plays, novels, short
stories, essays, memoirs, and travelogues, besides a vast number of letters.
• His reputation as a writer among his own countrymen was early assured, and the 30 poetical
and 28 prose works composed by him in Bengali are now regarded as classics.
• In 1901 he established the famous Shantiniketan at Bolpur. In 1923 it became Viswabharti.
• The English public first became interested in his works in 1912, and his fame rapidly spread.
• In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
• He used the money he won for the upkeep of the school at Bolpur.
• He was given the degree of Doctor of Letters in the university of Calcutta and accepted a
knighthood in 1915.
• In 1919 he resigned from the title as a protest against the methods adopted for the
repression of disturbances in the Punjab.
Education
• Rabindranath Tagore received his school education in the prestigious St Xavier’s
School.
• He studied law in the London University, but came back in 1880 without
receiving his degree.
• Rabindranath was fond of writing poems and stories since childhood.
• His father Devendranath Tagore was a well-known social reformer. He wanted
that Rabindra should become a barrister when he grew up. He sent him to
London to receive a legal education in London but Rabindra was fond of
literature. He liked to put down his feelings on paper. Eventually his father called
him back to India and put all family responsibilities on his shoulders.
• Rabindranath was a great nature lover. He was world famous as ‘Gurudev’. After
returning to India he again started his writing work
• Poems • Novels:
• Gitanjali (Song Offerings) • The Broken Nest
(1912), • The Home and the World
(1919),
• The Crescent Moon (1913),
• The Wreck (1921);
• The Gardener (1913),
Volume of letters:

Some
•
• Songs of Kabir (1915),
• Glimpses of Bengal (1921),
• Fruit Gathering (1916),
• Short stories
• Stray Birds (1917),

major
• The Cabuliwallah
• The Lover’s Gift and the
Crossing (1918) • Hungry Stones (1916)
• Mashi (1918)

works
• Plays
• Republished lectures,
• Chitra (1914),
• Sadhana, or the Realization of
• The King of the Dark Life (1913),
Chamber (1914), • Nationalism (1917),
• The Post Office (1914), • Personality (1917).
• The Cycle of Spring (1917), • He also published his Reminiscences
• Sacrifice (1917), and other (1917).
plays;
His influence and contribution
• Virtually no other major Indian writer has been so prolific as he was.
• Tagore became a national icon, one of a trinity together with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru
after he won the prestigious Nobel Prize.
• Even before winning the Nobel Prize, he was already a celebrated poet in Bengali
• In the West, even more than in India, he was seen as a sage and prophet of universal brotherhood,
travelling far and wide to preach his message of love and harmony.
• Many eminent Indian writers translated Tagore from Bengali and English to other Indian languages.
Gitanjali
• The manuscript of Tagore’s poems was for the first time read by William Rothenstein.
• He was very impressed by them and contacted the English poet Yeats and introduced Tagore to all the
writers, poets, painters and critics of the Western world.
• Rothenstein arranged for the poems to be published by the India Society.
• On November 13, 1913 when the Nobel prize awarded to Tagore was announced, Macmillan and
Co. had to publish 10 volumes of it.
• The main idea in Gitanjali is mysticism, which also brings up a number of other ideas.
• This type of mysticism is based on the ideas of renunciation, detachment from the world, and
asceticism. Tagore was influenced by a lot of mystic writers, such as Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, and,
to some extent, Sri Aurobindo
• God, Human, Nature, Death, Love
Continued:
• The sheer quantity of Tagore translations is remarkable. No complete bibliography
is available, but a team of scholars at the University of Delhi led by T.S. Satyanath
recorded 673 renderings of various works in ten selected Indian languages
(including English) between 1900 and 1950.
• The business of translating him into Indian languages may have passed its peak, but
it continues in new hybridized ways
• Hindi translation (2003) of Gitanjali by the poet Prayag Shukla.
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (1985)
• the beginning of a new phase in the history of Tagore translations.
• originally published in 1985, is reprinted with revisions in 1987, and
revised again in 1993.
• This latest reprint has a new preface and an additional appendix,
incorporated in 1994.
• Radice has selected 48 poems, arranging them in three sections, with 16
poems in each.
• Radice explains his 'internal principles of selection', confessing that
they are intuitive and hard to define, the most important being
'contrast, balance, novelty and rhythm'
• It has been Radice's endeavour in Selected Poems to represent the wide
diversity, the incredible range, the extraordinary 'poetic intellect' and
the fabulous 'technical virtuosity' of Tagore rather than portray him as a
'mystic' poet.
Can poetry be translated
• Radice's Selected Poems (1985) seems to have revived once
again the controversy about the translation of poetry
• there remains a sharp difference of opinions among the
poets, translators and translation critics as to how poetry
should be translated from one language to another.
Poetry
• In poetry, the underlying meaning is more important than the written words
• not only the transfer of the ambience of the poem, its language, musicality, beauty
etc. but bringing its overall effect into another language.
• In the words of Romantic poet-philosopher, Wordsworth, it has to be "recollected".
The thoughts and phrases are recombined and after this recombination the structure
that emerges.
• Famous romantic poet and poetry-philosopher Colridge calls poetry ""best words in
best order“
• A large section of critics believe that poetry is that which gets destroyed in
translation, and a group of translators says that poetry is that which continues to
shock translation
Poetry and Translation
• Dr. Sharimudiraj has poetically presented the whole process, The creator writes
from his own experience, the translator's experience is not his own, it is borrowed.
Therefore, if the creator is God, then the translator is a constrained God because
his creativity is left over from the original creation. The translator has to feel and
write what is in the original. Therefore the task of the translator is more difficult.
• George Chapman (1522–1634) proposed three methods of poetic translation in
the context of the Iliad.
• Complete translation should be avoided.
• Efforts should be made to reach the spirit of the original.
• Don't let scholarship or excessive rhetoric interrupt the flow of the translation.
Poetry and Translation
• John Dryden (1615-69) also opposed literalism in poetic translation and advocated for its
re-creation in the target language by taking the central element of the original text.
• Pope (1698–1714) Johnson (1708–84) made an important observation that just as the
author writes for his contemporary reader, the translator also writes for his contemporary
reader.
• Retailer (1791) has proposed three methods of poetic translation:
• 1. Following the sense (feeling should be same)
• 2. Following the style
• 3. Enlightenment of Original
• Eugene A. Nida
• Structurally the text of the source language is closest to a very general meaning.
• Then the meaning of the source language is transferred to the general structural level
of the target language.
• The target language should be an expression of the lexical and semantic equivalent of
the original.
Poetry and Translation
• Sir John Denham: the business of the translator is not just to "translate Language into
Language, but Poesie into Poesie"
• Rossetti: "a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one"
• A.K.Ramanujan: "nothing less than a poet can translate another"
• Goethe: "a plain prose translation is best for this purpose"
• Victor Hugo: "a good translation in verse seems to me something absurd, impossible"
• Hilaire Belloc:"translation of verse is nearly always better rendered in prose"
• in Translation and Translations Postgate seems to have clinched the issue by declaring
dogmatically that 'prose should be translated by prose and verse by verse'
Tagore's Idea of Poetry and
Translation
• Disapproving of the verse translation of his poetical works
Rabindranath Tagore pleads for their prose translation for the
foreigners.
• "My translations are frankly prose, --- my aim is to make them
simple with a suggestion of rhythm to give them a touch of the
lyric ... "
• with Tagore poetry translation does not involve mere
transmission of ideas, but the creation of an independent poem
or what he calls elsewhere the 'aesthetic transformation' of the
original into a separate poem
• Drawing on the essential ideas of the original the translator
creates a new poem in the target language.
• For Tagore, translation of poetry, thus, becomes a creative act in
which the ideas of the original are 'reincarnated' in the target
language.
 Translation and navigability
• Tagore's idea of translation as an act of 'navigability' is equivalent to the
German word ubersetzen which means to 'carry something from one bank of
the river to its other bank
• TL, a poem that is re-incarnated with the 'beauty' and 'glory' of 'a new birth' in
the receptor language.
• In order to bring about this 'new birth' the translator needs to have /a kindred
temperament' or 'a temperamental affinity'[ my translation] with the original
poet
 Translator as a Poet
• one needs to re-create the whole thing with the feeling of the original. ..
• The poet Tagore here conjures up a vision of the elusive beauty of poetry that can only be
captured in translation by a kindred poetic mind.
• This implies that the translator must be a poet and his translation must also be a poetic
interpretation of the original.
• According to Mathews, "... to translate a poem whole is to compose another poem .... And
it will have a life of its own, which is the voice of the translator"
• Regarding poetry translation Babler goes one step further in declaring that, " ... the
translator ought to be a poet as well as an interpreter, and his interpretation ought to be an
act of poetry"
 Translation and originality
• This raises the inevitable question of whether translation of poetry is identical to the original.
• "If one attempts to make the translation as far comprehensible as possible, it is really difficult to cast it
strictly in the mould of the original."
• translation of a poem can never be identical to the original; it can at best be its interpretation or re-
creation according to the poetics of translation.
• In order to compose such a poem in English the translator is required to interpret the original in the
light of his subjective impression. Naturally, the 'new English poem' is created out of the union of the
original "author plus [the] translator''
 Impossibility of translation?
• The translator starts with the 'unalterable' language of the original poem
and sets about 'dismantling' it and 'reassembling' the parts in order to re-
create a new poem in the receptor language.
• What the translator strives to create is not an identical text but 'an
analogous text' in the target language.
• This implies that 'the translator is therefore not firstly a writer and then a
reader, but firstly a reader who becomes a writer' afterwards
 Continued
• this liberating process is related to Walter Benjamin's idea of the translation
providing the 'afterlife' of a text or to Tagore's idea of the're-incamation' of the
original text.
• whether a 'meta-text' is or is not an inferior copy of the original.
• The task of the translator is simply a different kind of 'writerly task',
• According to Bassnett, poetry is, therefore, not what is lost in translation, as
claimed by Frost, but what is gained or re-created through the shaping spirit of
the translators' creative imagination (Ibid 74).
• Shelley's views of translation, as elucidated by Bassnett here, confirm and
vindicate Tagore's concept of translation as 're-creation' or 'rewriting'.
Summary
• the translator should preferably be a poet in order to translate poetry into poetry
• the translator should be as much faithful to the spirit of the original as to his creative
self that goes on clamouring within him for expression.
• the translator needs to be an interpreter and his interpretation of the original must be
an act of poetry
• the translation of a poem must be an independent work having a life of its own.
• the translation of a poem is very likely to be coloured by the time of the translator, for,
a translation can never exist in a vacuum, without being shaped by the spirit of the
time.
Radice's translation
• Radice cannot accept Nida's views regarding 'the reproduction of the message
rather than the conservation of the form' in a work of translation
• In the Introduction to Selected Poems he lays stress on maintaining metre, rhyme
and verseforms in his Tagore translations in order to get as close to the original
text as possible.
• Radice's translation of his poems into verse in Selected Poems (1985) followed by
his defence of verse translation in his essay "Ten Rules for Translating Tagore"
(1986)
• Explaining why he favours verse translation of Rabindranath's poems Radice says, "
.. .I never considered anything other than a verse translation of his poems, ... no
prose translation could begin to approach Tagore" ( Radice36). What he seems to
imply is that Tagore's verse is so imaginative and creative that nothing but poetic
translation can successfully capture its elusive poetic essence.
Continued
• A translation of his poems cannot be 'credible' unless the qualities of Tagore's
greatness are "carried across' to the target readers in both form and content.
• As a creative writer, Tagore has distinguished himself as "a perpetual innovator,
constantly creating new forms and styles in poetry" and much of the meaning and
power of his poetry, Radice believes, derives from its metre and form. As the
translator of his poetry, Radice likewise tries to 'create equivalents for Tagore's
wonderful range of verse-forms, metres and structural devices' to represent him in
the TL
• It also provides the readers with an extensive introduction and detailed annotation
in order to help them understand the poems
• Radice 'transcreates' them creating 'analogous' verse-forms in English and explores
the versatility of his creative power.
Thank You!