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Elective English—III

Notes strong claim, and it calls attention to some greatness in this quintessentially Bengali writer—
identified by a fellow Bengali—that might not be readily echoed in the wider world today,
especially in the West. For the Bengali public, Tagore has been, and remains, an altogether
exceptional literary figure, towering over all others. His poems, songs, novels, short stories,
critical essays, and other writings have vastly enriched the cultural environment in which
hundreds of millions of people live in the Bengali-speaking world, whether in Bangladesh or in
India. Something of that glory is acknowledged in India outside Bengal as well, and even in
some other parts of Asia, including China and Japan, but in the rest of the world, especially in
Europe and America, Tagore is clearly not a household name.
And yet the enthusiasm and excitement that Tagore’s writings created in Europe and America in
the early years of the 20th century were quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poems for
which Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English
translation in London in March 1913 and was reprinted ten times by the time the award was
announced in November. For many years, Tagore was the rage in many European countries. His
public appearances were always packed with people wanting to hear him. Then the Tagore tide
ebbed, and by the 1930s, the huge excitement was all over. Indeed, by 1937, Graham Greene was
able to remark, “As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still
take his poems very seriously.”
The one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth, which we mark this year,
is a good occasion to ask what happened.
The occasion has also generated some new books on Tagore, in addition to the distinguished
ones that already exist. Harvard University Press has just published a very fine selection of
Tagore’s writings, The Essential Tagore, with translations by leading scholars from Bangladesh,
India, Britain, and America. The book also has insightful editorial comments by the two editors,
Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty. The book has an imaginative and original foreword by
the excellent writer Amit Chaudhuri, with a very engaging analysis of “poetry as polemic.”

The title of the book presumes that some of Tagore must be essential. However, given the
comprehensive neglect of this writer in the contemporary English literary world, it could well
be asked whether Tagore is indeed essential at all. We must also ask why a writer who evokes
comparison with Shakespeare and Goethe tends to generate so little enthusiasm in Western
countries today. There is surely some mystery here.
At one level, it is not particularly hard to see that his native readers can get something from
Tagore’s writings, especially his poems and songs that would be missed by those who do not
read Bengali. Even Yeats, his biggest promoter in the English-speaking world, did not like
Tagore’s own English translations. “Tagore does not know English,” Yeats declared, adding a
little theory to his diagnosis, as he often did: “No Indian knows English.”
Yeats was very willing to work with Tagore to overcome that handicap in the production of the
English version of Gitanjali, though there are some serious problems with the Yeats-assisted
translations as well. The more general obstacle to the appreciation of Tagore in English surely
comes from the fact that poetry is notoriously difficult to translate. Even with the best effort and
talent, it can be hard—if not impossible—to preserve the magic of poetry as it is transplanted
from one language to another. Anyone who knows Tagore’s poems in Bengali would typically
find it difficult to be really satisfied with any translation, no matter how good. To this impediment
must be added the fact that Tagore’s poetry, which often takes the form of songs in an innovative
style of lyrical singing, called Rabindrasangeet, has transformed popular Bengali music with its
particular combination of reflective language and compatible tunes.
There is, in addition, the problem that Tagore’s influence on Bengali writing is so gigantic and
epoch-making that his innovative language itself has profound importance to the Bengali reading
public. Kazi Nazrul Islam, almost certainly the most successful Bengali poet with the exception

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