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Unit 10: Beggarly Heart by Rabindranath Tagore

10.8 Impact Notes

Every year, many events pay tribute to Tagore: groups scattered across the globe celebrate
Kabipranam, his birth anniversary, the annual Tagore Festival held in Urbana, Illinois; Rabindra
Path Parikrama walking pilgrimages from Kolkata to Santiniketan; and recitals of his poetry,
which are held on important anniversaries. Bengali culture is fraught with this legacy: from
language and arts to history and politics. Amartya Sen scantly deemed Tagore a “towering
figure”, a “deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker”. Tagore’s Bengali originals—
the 1939 Rabîndra Rachanâvalî—is canonised as one of his nation’s greatest cultural treasures,
and he was roped into a reasonably humble role: “the greatest poet India has produced”.

Tagore was renowned throughout much of Europe, North America and East Asia. He co-founded
Dartington Hall School, a progressive coeducational institution; in Japan, he influenced such
figures as Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Tagore’s works were widely translated into English,
Dutch, German, Spanish, and other European languages by Czech indologist Vincenc Lesný,
French Nobel laureate André Gide, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, former Turkish Prime
Minister Bülent Ecevit and others. In the United States, Tagore’s lecturing circuits, particularly
those of 1916–1917, were widely attended and wildly acclaimed. Some controversies involving
Tagore, possibly fictive, trashed his popularity and sales in Japan and North America after the
late 1920s, concluding with his “near total eclipse” outside Bengal. Yet an astonished Salman
Rushdie discovered a latent reverence of Tagore during a trip to Nicaragua.
By way of translations, Tagore influenced Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral; Mexican
writer Octavio Paz; and Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset, Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón
Jiménez. In the period 1914–1922, the Jiménez-Camprubí pair produced twenty-two Spanish
translations of Tagore’s English corpus; they heavily revised The Crescent Moon and other key
titles. In these years, Jiménez developed “naked poetry”. Ortega y Gasset wrote that “Tagore’s
wide appeal [owes to how] he speaks of longings for perfection that we all have [...] Tagore
awakens a dormant sense of childish wonder, and he saturates the air with all kinds of enchanting
promises for the reader, who [...] pays little attention to the deeper import of Oriental mysticism”.
Tagore’s works circulated in free editions around 1920—alongside those of Plato, Dante,
Cervantes, Goethe, and Tolstoy.
Tagore was deemed over-rated by some. Graham Greene doubted that “anyone but Mr. Yeats
can still take his poems very seriously.” Several prominent Western admirers—including Pound
and, to a lesser extent, even Yeats—criticised Tagore’s work. Yeats, unimpressed with his English
translations, railed against that “Damn Tagore [...] We got out three good books, Sturge Moore
and I, and then, because he thought it more important to know English than to be a great poet,
he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English,
no Indian knows English.” William Radice, who “English[ed]” his poems, asked: “What is their
place in world literature?” He saw him as “kind of counter-cultur[al],” bearing “a new kind of
classicism” that would heal the “collapsed romantic confusion and chaos of the 20th century.”
The translated Tagore was “almost nonsensical” and subpar English offerings reduced his
trans-national appeal:

[...] not anyone who knows Tagore’s poems in their original Bengali can feel satisfied with any
of the translations (made with or without Yeats’s help). Even the translations of his prose works
suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M. Forster noted [of] The Home and the World [that]
“[t]he theme is so beautiful,” but the charms have “vanished in translation,” or perhaps “in an
experiment that has not quite come off.” Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India”.

10.9 Analysis of Tagore and His Works

In his book Raga Mala, Ravi Shankar, the great musician, argues that had Rabindranath Tagore
“been born in the West he would now be [as] revered as Shakespeare and Goethe.” This is a

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