Prince and Other Modern Fables , livre ebook

Penguin Books Ltd - Rabindranath Tagore

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

78 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Fairy tales with a difference India's greatest poet of modern times, Nobel Prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore was a philosopher, a visionary and a storyteller par excellence. His short, lyrical prose fables, set in a generic fairyland or in everyday locales, are philosophical excursions across magical landscapes that speak to the imaginative child in every reader. The pages of The Prince and Other Modern Fables are full of insightful little stories that reveal the simple truth about life. There is the story of a little boy who has lost his mother, of a tribal girl who is mistaken for a fairy, of a jester who watches a king fight his battles from the sidelines, of a young man who tries to come to terms with his first heartache, and of a modern-day prince who is trying to eke out a living in the unforgiving city. Asking questions that we usually don't stop to ask ourselves, and often coming up with answers that are surprising in their simplicity, every story sparkles with insights on the human condition, and remains etched in the mind long afterwards. Now available in a lucid and vibrant translation, this classic collection is sure to enchant modern readers who might never have encountered it before.

Sujets

Short story

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	26 septembre 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184750089
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0349€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Fairy tales with a difference
India’s greatest poet of modern times, Nobel Prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore was a philosopher, a visionary and a storyteller par excellence. His short, lyrical prose fables, set in a generic fairyland or in everyday locales, are philosophical excursions across magical landscapes that speak to the imaginative child in every reader.
The pages of The Prince and Other Modern Fables are full of insightful little stories that reveal the simple truth about life. There is the story of a little boy who has lost his mother, of a tribal girl who is mistaken for a fairy, of a jester who watches a king fight his battles from the sidelines, of a young man who tries to come to terms with his first heartache, and of a modern-day prince who is trying to eke out a living in the unforgiving city. Asking questions that we usually don’t stop to ask ourselves, and often coming up with answers that are surprising in their simplicity, every story sparkles with insights on the human condition, and remain etched in the mind long afterwards.
Now available in a lucid and vibrant translation, this classic collection is sure to enchant modern readers who might never have encountered it before.
Translated from the Bengali by Sreejata Guha

PUFFIN BOOKS
THE PRINCE AND OTHER MODERN FABLES
Born in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore was one of the key figures of the Bengal Renaissance. He started writing at an early age, and by the turn of the century had become a household name in Bengal as a poet, a songwriter, a playwright, an essayist, a short story writer and a novelist. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his verse collection Gitanjali . At about the same time he founded Visva Bharati, a university located in Shantiniketan near Kolkata. Called the 'Great Sentinel' of modern India by Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore steered clear of active politics, but is famous for returning the knighthood conferred on him as a gesture of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
Tagore was a pioneering literary figure, renowned for his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama, music and painting, which he took up late in life. His works include some sixty collections of verse, novels like Gora and Home and the World , plays like Red Oleanders and The Post Office , over a hundred short stories, essays on religious, social and literary topics, and over 2000 songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941.His eminence as India's greatest modern poet remains unchallenged to this day.
*
Sreejata Guha has an MA in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has worked as a translator and editor with Stree Publications, Seagull Books and Jacaranda Press. She has previously translated Picture Imperfect ,a collection of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi stories, Taslima Nasrin's novel French Lover and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas for Penguin. Her translation of Tagore's Home and the World is forthcoming in Penguin.

The Prince and Other Modern Fables

Rabindranath Tagore

Translated from the Bengali by Sreejata Guha
Illustrations by Rosy Rodrigues
PUFFIN BOOKS

Copyright
PUFFIN BOOKS
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, UK Penguin Group Inc.,375 Hudson Street,New York,NY 10014,USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd.,707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books Canada Ltd.,90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd.,67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd., Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North,Johannesburg 2193, South Africa
www.penguinbooksindia.com
First published in Puffin by Penguin Books India 2003 All rights reserved ISBN: 978-01-4333-570-2 This Digital Edition published in 2010. e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-008-9 Digital conversion prepared by DK Digital Media, India.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this book.

Translator's Dedication
To Swapna Guha, my mother who taught me to read between the lines and beyond

Translator's Note
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal's greatest writer ever, was also a philosopher and seer.There is ample evidence of Tagore's spiritual and meditative streak in his songs and poetry,including the Nobel Prize-winning collection, Gitanjali . Lipika , the collection from which the pieces in The Prince and Other Modern Fables are drawn, was a volume where Tagore's spiritual and philosophical tenets were most skilfully and effectively employed.
Epitomizing the Bengal Renaissance, Tagore led a rich and varied life, and was influenced by various cultures and much reading. Consequently, his writing contains a rare breadth and depth.At the same time,he used language that was easily accessible to everyone.This combination was tailormade for the writing of fables, and the overtly fabular structure is one of the qualities that sets Lipika apart from Tagore's other collections.Tagore is often cited as the most prominent Indian equivalent of the Western Romantics, and certainly there is a close affinity between the lyrical idealism and positivism that characterizes Lipika and the odes and cantos of Shelley,Keats and Byron.Like the Romantics, Tagore's writing dwells on the inspirational and the superhuman; the influence of Indian philosophy, particularly the Upanishads, is clearly visible in it.These elements lend strengths to the fables that make up Lipika , and render them memorable.
Lipika was first published in book form in August 1922. Each of the pieces had individually been published between 1917 and 1922 in various contemporary Bangla publications like Sabuj Patra , Probashi , Bharati and Bangabani . Prose-poetry as a form had recently been popularized in the West by renowned writers like Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde among others.Tagore attempted to write prose-poetry in Bangla for the first time in Lipika . According to Tagore, he didn't break up the lines into poems at the time of publication 'most probably out of cowardice'. But the pieces, as readers can judge for themselves,contain not poetry that has been written out in prose form, but intrinsically a quaint and endearing mixture of prose and poetry that is the perfect vehicle for the modern fable.
Much of the source material for these fables has to do with personal sorrow; Tagore had suffered the loss of several close family members in the years before he wrote these pieces. But while many of the pieces do deal with grief,death,mortality and transience, these are seldom the central focus; a transcendental spirit shapes and guides the narrative towards a superior, more complete, more fulfilling understanding of the nature of the universe and of human existence. As Tagore mentions in his autobiography, Jiban Smriti , with his first close encounter with the death of a loved one came the realization that life was not a prisoner within the walls of reality, that death could set one free. When viewed through the window of death, life appeared in its true form – stretching in its vastness – at its most liberated, infinite best. The pieces in The Prince and Other Modern Fables celebrate this freedom: from authority, from conventions, from the corporeal, the material and from life itself.They lend wings to the imagination.They ask the mind to stretch itself.
It takes a highly evolved soul and a very mature thinker to turn personal loss into a creative outpouring of such poignant and profound dimensions. It also takes a very accomplished writer to make the notion of transcendental positivism come alive so evocatively in such short pieces. Tagore's style of narration is simple and direct; he uses familiar metaphors from myths and fables and the self-assured structure of fairy tales and parables to reach into the deep recesses of the human psyche and explore the contours of thought. In the process, he overturns conventional constructs and stereotypical notions through abstractions that, in the fabular world he creates, sometimes seem more concrete than life itself.
The Prince and Other Modern Fables was originally not written exclusively for children, and even in translation, both children and adults should be able to derive equa