In the popular mind, Rabindranath Tagore is synonymous with Gitanjali for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. And yet, very little is known about the background to this text and its composition history. In a new publication, perhaps the first time ever, scholar-poet, Udaya Narayana Singh, offers refreshingly a new reading of two sets of Gitanjali poems by Rabindranath Tagore, the two volumes produced at two different times in the writer’s career.
The first, the Bengali Gitanjali (August 1910, Calcutta) enjoyed wide circulation with 86 songs and 71 lyrical poems — 157 texts in all. The second, called Gitanjali: Song Offerings (November 1912, London) published by the India Society, had only 53 (29 songs and 24 lyrical poems) of the original 157 texts; these were collected from the 1910 anthology in Bengali. 50 other texts were taken from his eight books of poems. Barring the 53 translations of the original 1910 text, we have not had the pleasure of reading the other Gitanjali. Singh renders all the 157 poems and songs into English for the benefit of the contemporary audience.
What kinds of choices did Tagore make in terms of themes, ‘lexical selections, allusions, inter-textual linkages’ and ‘philosophical ideas’ in his Gitanjali series of poems?
The Bengali text, suggests Singh, contained ‘the variety as well as various dichotomies’ whereas the English counterpart concentrated on Lila (Divine dalliances), Puja (devotion) and other motifs such as Life/ Death Dissonance/Harmony, Finite/Infinite, Poetry/Muse, Language/ Silence, Time/Eternity, Real/Ideal as well as I/Me and You/Yours etc.
Singh concentrates in the first part of this volume on some of the following aspects/ issues: constructing Gitanjali for the western readers, the choices Tagore made and the dilemmas he faced, as well as the meta-text.
He centre-stages some of the key issues by alluding to the opening lines of the English text of Tagore. These lines, Singh insightfully points out, came from the anthology called Gitimalya . The discerning mind cannot miss here the contrast between the original lines, full of echo expressions; aspectual verbs; emphatics and peculiar syntactic manipulations vis-à-vis the translated version written in a semi-classical style. Can the English expression ‘Pleasure’, for instance, stand for the Sanskrit term ‘Lila’, Singh asks rhetorically?
While trying to fathom the underlying patterns in the choices Tagore made in his English renderings, Singh wonders if it was only the question of ‘thematic congruence’ and ‘ease of transportability across different kinds of languages’ and the appeal of the original text for a foreign audience that acted as weighty considerations in Tagore’s mind. There are no easy answers here, barring the fact that Gitanjali: Song Offerings represents an outstanding example of literary-cultural transference across linguistic barriers.
What was the setting for the English translations? Some renderings were done in the river boat on the Padma River in East Bengal; others were penned during the time of the monsoon in Bolpur. The physical ambience underlying the composition of the opening song is vividly evoked. The ‘Kala Baisakhi’ – seasonal storm of Santiniketan- ‘the drizzly breeze’ and ‘drops’ that ‘chased the wind’, act as an effective backdrop to the composition of the poems.
Singh invokes many of these beautiful settings and brings to our attention, Tagore’s self-education as evidenced in his work as a translation-practitioner. His work Sahitya (1907), it is worth noting, illuminates our understanding in this regard. Singh juxtaposes the Bengali and English renderings along with comments and interpretations to show the fascinating manner in which the compositions were realized in the hands of a poetic genius.
For a comparative perspective, some of the important readings of Tagore such as those by Andre Gide, Howard Young, Edmund Jayasurya, Brother James Talarovic and Joe Winter are taken up. The two Tagore texts are considered in the light of the seminal work of John Ruskin, Victorian painter, architect and poet-theoretician, Focusing attention on the seven principles of Ruskin,in his 1849 book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Singh argues that these seven act as the ‘seven lamps’ for Tagore. They are: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. Further, Tagore was as much a poet as a linguistician. For example, if we go by sentence closures in the 4100 lines of the Bengali Gitanjali, we find 891 sentences marked by ‘comma’ whereas there are only 28 constructs separated by ‘semi-colons’ and 195 inter-sentential or inter-clausal segments indicated by ‘dash’ markings. The Meta-Text of Tagore, argues Singh, makes a lasting appeal to a number of writers such as Proust, Emerson, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Yeats and Pound.
Secondly, Singh underlines that the text of Tagore is primarily a dialogue between the Self and the Other, between ‘I’ and ‘You’. (‘Thou’ in Tagore’s text). Thirdly, the pieces make the anthology a ‘predominantly musical text’, seen through 52 uses of the lexis ‘Gan’ (meaning ‘song’) and its synonym ‘Git’ and ‘Sangit’. Likewise, there is the recurrent play of metaphors, just as there are polarities/ dyads like Death – Life and Sorrow – Joy.
Most of these are significantly absent in the English renderings. Singh infers that Tagore progressively moves away from the idiom of speech to one of silence. In fact, the Egyptian poet-critic Muhommad Hesham’s (2008) article ‘Language of External Silence: A Reading of Poems by Rabindranath Tagore’ is cited to validate this claim.
In carrying out the twin tasks — analysis, interpretations and introduction — and the actual translation into English, Udaya Narayana Singh bridges the gap between the creative self and the critical mind. In the process, he makes an original contribution to Tagore studies.
THE OTHER GITANJALI: Analysis, narration and translation by Udaya Narayana Singh;
pub. by AnimaViva Multilingue.
