ABSTRACT
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a poet on a huge scale. The sheer size of his collected works places him among the most prolific writers in the world; but more importantly the all-inclusiveness of his achievement is a reminder—in an age when Western poets have often set quite narrow limits to their work—that a creative artist can emulate the prodigality of Nature herself. He was, however, an epic writer who never produced an epic: there is no one work that one can point to as the summa of his art. This, and the fact that he wrote in Bengali (a language which very few foreigners learn), makes the task of projecting his genius outside his native Bengal formidably difficult. The English translations that he himself made—in particular his collection of devotional lyrics Gitanjali for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913—are now perceived to be inadequate both in quality and range. Other Bengali-speaking translators, for all that English is spoken fluently by many Bengalis, have generally been hampered by being too close to Tagore. Translation, like landscape painting, is an art that needs to be done at a distance.
