ABSTRACT
When I started my work on Tagore in the early 1980s, he was, in the West, an almost forgotten figure. I had a strong feeling that the old impression of Tagore, based largely on his own translations and their numerous secondary translations into other languages, was false and incomplete. I wanted to establish his reputation on a new basis: to show not only through new translations but through an introduction and notes that he was a poet of enormous range and sophistication. I wanted to open a new door, and maybe I was successful in that aim, for my Selected Poems of Tagore which first came out in 1985, has been constantly in print since then, and nowadays many people who cannot read Bengali get their first impression of Tagore from this book rather than from Gitanjali and the other translations that Tagore did himself.
