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Described by Rabindranath Tagore as revelations of my true self , the poems and songs of Gitanjali established the writer s literary talent worldwide. They include eloquent sonnets such as the famous Where the mind is without fear , intense explorations of love, faith and nature ( Light, oh where is the light? ) and tender evocations of childhood ( When my play was with thee ). In this new translation to mark Tagore s one-hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, William Radice renders with beauty and precision the poetic rhythm and intensity of the Bengali originals. In his arrangement of Tagore s original sequence of poems alongside his translations, Radice restores to Gitanjali the structure, style and conception that were hidden by W. B. Yeats s edition of 1912, making this book a magnificent addition to the Tagore library.

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Poetry

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	06 mai 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184751451
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Gitanjali
Song Offerings
a new translation by William Radice
with an Introduction
and a new text of Tagore s translation based on his manuscript
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Gitanjali Reborn
A Note on the Texts
Gitanjali: Song Offerings a new translation alternating with a new text of Tagore s translation
Additional Poems
Appendix A: Tables 1, 2 & 3 the manuscript sequence source books chronological order of the Additional Poems
Appendix B: Facsimiles from the Rothenstein manuscript from the Crescent Moon Sheaf
Appendix C: Gitanjali: Song Offerings W.B. Yeats s Introduction the Macmillan text
Appendix D: The Rothenstein Manuscript versus the Macmillan Text table 4, with notes
Appendix E: I Shall Stand by John W. Rattray
Indexes
index to the new translation index to the new text of Tagore s translation index to the Macmillan text
Copyright Page
to
the many people in India and Britain who helped me to complete this book
with special thanks to
Dr Manas Kumar Bhattacharya, Professor D.P. Baksi and Dr Debadyuti Baksi (orthopaedic surgeons), Dr Deepa Banerjee (anaesthesiologist), and Mr Ayananta Dalal (physiotherapist)
tom r son r th l y s j ba j dukher a rudh r
( Gitanjali 80/83)
In green India among quiet trees that bend over blue water lives Tagore
In Green India , in Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Sre ko Kosovel , translated by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson
Introduction
These poems of mine are very different from other literary productions of the kind. They are revelations of my true self to me. The literary man was a mere amanuensis-very often knowing nothing of the true meaning of what he was writing
Letter from Rabindranath Tagore to William Rothenstein, 30 December 1912
1.
A new translation of Rabindranath Tagore s most famous book Gitanjali seems timely because of three consecutive anniversaries. 2011 is the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Tagore s birth in 1861. 2012 is the centenary of the publication of Tagore s own translation of Gitanjali . 2013 is the centenary of the Nobel Prize that followed directly from the unprecedented success of the book. In terms too of the direction that literary studies have taken in recent decades a new translation of Gitanjali seems in keeping with the Zeitgeist . A brilliant book by Tagore s compatriot Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Metaphysics of Text (2010) charts the increasing sensitivity of scholars to the indeterminacy of texts: the real or definitive text of a literary work being difficult to define, and its identity being inseparable from its reception history or afterlife . Gitanjali had a most extraordinary afterlife, which through numerous secondary translations continues to expand and develop. But what made Gitanjali unique was its lack of a precise original . There are examples in world literature of works whose originals have been lost and which have only survived in translation. 1 But it is hard to think of any other case of a writer conceiving a work in translation without a precisely defined source.
In 1910 Tagore published a Bengali book called Gitanjali . It consists of 157 lyric poems, many of which are songs. It was followed by Gitimalya (1914) and Gitali (1914). It is convenient to refer to the three books together as the Gitanjali phase , 2 to which also belonged the plays Raja (1910) and Dakghar (1912, translated as The Post Office , 1914). The English Gitanjali with its subtitle Song Offerings overlaps with the Bengali Gitanjali by just over half: 53 of its 103 poems are from the Bengali Gitanjali . The remaining poems come from ten other books which mostly do not belong to the Gitanjali phase as such. Diverse though these sources are, I would say that the English Gitanjali is derived from three types of poem. There are song-like poems of the Gitanjali phase proper; there are intricate, sometimes sensuous, sometimes austere sonnets that Tagore published in Naibedya ( Offerings , 1901), including what in India has become his most famous poem of all- Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high (No. 35); and there are lighter, ballad-like poems from Kheya ( The Ferry , 1906).
Would-be translators of Gitanjali , therefore, have two options. Either they can do a new translation of the Bengali Gitanjali , or they can attempt a retranslation of all the poems that are in the English Gitanjali . The first option has already been taken by Brother James Talarovic in 1983, 3 and by Joe Winter in 1998. 4 In the present book I have chosen the second, more audacious option. Audacious it certainly is, because Tagore s own translations of these poems have acquired a classic status; they were the basis of his international reputation, and his Nobel Prize in 1913 was given specifically for Gitanjali (with some mention too of its follow-up volume The Gardener ) and not for his achievements as a poet in Bengali.
In his book, Sukanta Chaudhuri discusses the media by which texts can be transmitted, whether manuscript, print or electronic, and how, with any work of literature, this material embodiment affects the signifying function of the text . 5 The English Gitanjali s material embodiment, first as a limited edition published by the India Society in London in November 1912 and then by Macmillan in March 1913, was profoundly affected by W.B. Yeats s passionate and influential Introduction. Without Yeats s imprimatur, it is difficult to imagine that Thomas Sturge Moore would have been successful in his recommendation of Tagore to the Swedish Academy for the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature. Again, it is hard to think of another example of a literary work owing so much of its impact to an Introduction written by a famous writer from an entirely different culture. Moreover, Yeats s involvement was not limited to the writing of an Introduction. He played a highly active role in the preparation of the book for the press, making changes and adjustments to Tagore s drafts and taking possessive control of the proofs.
What was the manuscript from which Yeats worked? How did it come into existence? What is the relationship between that manuscript and the text of Gitanjali in Tagore s English translation that we have today? These are questions that have to be answered carefully if we are to understand precisely what the present book is attempting to do.
2.
Of the 103 poems in the English Gitanjali , 83 of them can be found in what has come to be known as the Rothenstein manuscript . This was a small note book in blue roan 6 that Tagore s close friend and loyal correspondent for thirty years, William Rothenstein, carefully preserved. 7 It belongs now with the Rothenstein papers that are in the Houghton Library at Harvard. There are 86 translations in this manuscript, three of which were not used in the English Gitanjali . Of the remaining 20 poems, twelve of them exist in what is known as the Crescent Moon Sheaf , 8 a file of miscellaneous manuscripts that is also among the Rothenstein papers. That leaves eight for which no manuscript has survived. The translations in the Rothenstein manuscript are neatly and clearly written, with very few erasures or corrections. This suggests that they were a fair copy of rougher drafts that have not survived. 9 Tagore s own account of how he came to do these translations is well known from a letter he wrote in his niece Indira Devi. It was written on 6 May 1913 in London and refers to the delay in Tagore s departure for England that had arisen from illness:
You have alluded to the English translation of Gitanjali . I have not been able to imagine to this day how people came to like it so much. That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the vanity to feel ashamed of it. If anybody wrote an English note asking me to tea, I did not feel equal to answering it. Perhaps you think by now I have got over that delusion. By no means. That I have written in English seems to be the delusion. On the day I was to board the ship, I fainted due to my frantic efforts at leave-taking, and the journey itself was postponed. Then I went to Shelidah to take rest. 10 But unless the brain is fully active, one does not feel strong enough to relax completely; so the only way to keep myself calm was to take up some light work.
It was then the month of Chaitra (March-April), the air was thick with the fragrance of mango-blossoms and all hours of the day were delirious with the song of birds. When a child is full of vigour, he does not think of his mother. It is only when he feels tired that he wants to settle himself easily in her lap. That was exactly my position. With all my heart and with all my holiday I seem to have ensconced myself comfortably in the arms of Chaitra, without missing a particle of its light, its air, its scent and its song. In such a state one cannot remain idle. When the air strikes one s bones they tend to respond in music; this is an old habit of mine, as you know. Yet I had not the energy to gird up my loins and sit down to write. So I took up the poems of Gitanjali and set myself to translate them one by one. You may wonder why such a crazy ambition should possess one in such a weak state of health. But believe me, I did not undertake this task in a spirit of reckless bravado. I simply felt an urge to recapture through the medium of another language the feelings and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in the days gone by.
The pages of a small exercise-book came to be filled gradually, and with it in my pocket I boarded the ship. The idea of keeping it in my pocket was that when my mind became restless on the high seas, I would recline on a deck-chair and set myself to translate one or two poems from time to time. And that is what actually happened. From one exercise-book I passed on to another. Rothenstein already had an inkling of my reputation as a poet fr