Rabindranath Tagore’s formal school education remained incomplete. He was educated at home primarily by house tutors, after briefly attending three public schools in Calcutta without much success. The curriculum, at home, included English and he confidently attempted to translate William Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the age of twelve. Like several of his early writings, his translation of Macbeth was lost.

Rabindranath wrote primarily and extensively in Bengali. He gradually went on to become a powerful bilingual writer, translating several of his literary pieces into English. Prior to his visit to England in 1912, he translated a selection of his Bengali poems which resulted in his maiden anthology of devotional songs and poems, Gitanjali. Rabindranath, after his arrival in London, showed his translations to his friend, the British portrait painter William Rothenstein. Rothenstein prepared three copies of the manuscript and sent them to William Butler Yeats, Stopford Brooke and A.C. Bradley for comments.

Yeats suggested minor modifications to Rabindranath’s translations and the India Society of London published Gitanjali in 1912. Yeats wrote an Introduction to the book, elucidating that Rabindranath’s prose translations ‘stirred’ his blood even without knowing the ‘movements of thought that have made them possible.’ He went on to write, ‘These lyrics ... display in their thought I have dreamed of all my life long.’ With these words Yeats not only praised Rabindranath’s outstanding poetic genius, but also his qualities as a translator. However, it may be noted that much later in 1935, Yeats would comment, ‘Tagore does not know English, no Indians know English.’¹ 

Gitanjali brought Rabindranath the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Ten subsequent editions of Gitanjali were printed in London between March and November of 1913. Rabindranath’s sudden exposure to global limelight widely and steadily demanded translations of his works and he himself took much interest in translating some of his literary pieces into English. As a result, several of his books were published in English (in his own English translations and few others originally written in English), which included: The Gardener (poems, 1913), Sadhana (essays and lectures, 1913), The Crescent Moon (child-poems, 1913), Chitra (drama, 1913), Fruit-Gathering (poems, 1916), Sacrifice and Other Plays (1917), Nationalism (essays, 1917), Personality (lectures delivered in America, 1917), Lover’s Gift and Crossings (poems and songs, 1918), The Parrot’s Training (allegorical satire, 1918), Creative Unity (essays and lectures, 1922), Talks in China (addresses, 1925), The Child (poem 1931), The Religion of Man (lectures, 1931), Man (lectures, 1931) and Crisis in Civilization (lecture, 1941).

 

Rabindranath’s career as an English writer is restricted primarily to translations of his own Bengali works. His original English writings included lectures, addresses and numerous letters which were largely composed during his foreign travels or while corresponding with his global circle of friends.

His first known attempt to render his own poem appears to be ‘Desire for a Human Soul’, an incomplete English translation of ‘Nisphal Kamana’ in the manuscript of Manashi (1890). Rabindranath’s poems, written directly in English are very few, including his major English poem The Child (1931). He translated this poem into Bengali as Sisu Tirtha which was included in his book Punascha in 1932. Scholars have identified a poem (‘The lamp is trimmed./Comrades, bring your own fire to light it...’) as the first poem written directly in English by Rabindranath in 1918. This poem was written to support a fund-raising campaign for the Society for the Promotion of National Education in celebrating the National Education Week in Adyar, Madras. Discussing this poem, Rabindranath wrote to James H. Cousins in a letter that, ‘The message I sent for the National Education Week is not twice born. It was written for the occasion in English at the instigation of Mr. Arundale [George Arundale].’

 

Rabindranath composed numerous short poems during his visits to China and Japan between 1916 and 1929. While many of those autograph-poems were written in Bengali with English translations, he wrote many others directly into English without any Bengali version. During his visit to Europe in 1926, he arranged a selection of these poems in his own calligraphy for a bilingual book of epigrammatic verses Lekhan. The book was printed in Germany in 1926 and published in India the following year. Stray Birds (1916) and Fireflies (1928) were two other books published during the lifetime of the poet compiling Rabindranath’s short verses, most of which had been composed as autograph-poems. Rabindranath used to modify his literary works at frequent intervals, producing several versions of the same creative pieces in the process. Multiple versions of Rabindranath’s autograph-poems can be found either in the poet’s own handwriting or in typed scripts or printed forms.

The following is a compilation of some unpublished autograph-poems of Rabindranath from the archives of Rabindra-Bhavana at Visva-Bharati. The file ‘MSF Autograph Poems’ at Rabindra-Bhavana contain several sets of typed poems of Rabindranath. A few of these pages are typewritten drafts with handwritten corrections and revisions by Rabindranath. The other poems seem to be the final typed copies without any modifications by the poet. The file ‘MS 460’ includes eight poems by Rabindranath in his own handwriting in an address book. Some postal addresses were also jotted down by him in some pages of the largely unused notebook.

 

Rabindranath Tagore reiterated his thoughts and ideas in his poems, essays, speeches, songs, letters and also in his manuscript doodles and paintings. Hence, it would be difficult to ascertain whether these poems were written directly in English or they were ‘twice born’, being English translations of their Bengali originals. Rabindranath was influenced by the precision, depth, power and intensity of Japanese haiku poetry and took his autograph-poems seriously. This is evident in the painstaking modification of many of his autograph-poems years after they had been written and published.

 

Rabindranath was never ambitious to be known as an ‘English’ poet in any sense of the term. Neither did he continue to translate his own works simultaneously and constantly with his original creations in Bengali, presumably because he felt that ‘... it is never the function of a poet to personally help in transportation of his poems to an alien form and atmosphere...’² These sporadic short verses of Rabindranath that remain undated, were possibly written in response to specific public demands and not so much out of any urge to express himself in a language with its ‘strictly guarded boundaries.’³

Poems of Rabindranath

From ‘MSF Autograph Poems’

1. Beauty smiles in the bud,

in its perfect incompleteness.

2. Break the difference

and it is multiplied.

3. Children run out of the temple

and play in the dust.

God watches their games

and forgets the priest.

4. Devil’s wares are expensive,

God’s gifts are priceless.

5. God among stars

waits for man

to light his lamp.

6. God watches the single night

of a firefly

and the agelong night of the star.

7. I hear the knockings at my heart

of the mornings hopes

sadly coming back

at the night.

8. Let him take note of the thorn

who can see the flower

as a whole.

9. Life’s tapestry is woven

by the joining and breaking

of its threads.

10. Love whose loss is forgotten

is like a dumb hour

that has no bird’s songs

but only cricket’s chirp.

11. Mind, like a brook,

starts up at a sudden liquid note

of its own

that is never repeated.

12. My migratory songs are on wings

seeking their nests in thy voice.

13. My offerings are spent at the wayside shrines,

I bring my emptiness to the Temple.

14. Thy untuned strings beg for music

in their anguished discord.

15. Thy words that are slight

may lightly dance upon time’s waves

while my words heavy with import

sink.

16. The reward of my work is in daily wages,

in love of my own final value.

17. Since she has vanished from my reach

the wind carries the rustle of her movements

among the restless grass.

18. Spring in pity for the desolate branch

left one fluttering kiss in a solitary leaf.

19. The ancient light is ever young,

the shadow of the moment is born old.

20. The bubble doubts the sea

and its laugh bursts into emptiness.

21. The day offers to the silence of night

his golden lute to be tuned.

22. The day’s glare of curiosity

makes the stars shrink

and disappear.

23. The distance came near to me

in the morning

and came still nearer

when taken away by the night.

24. The earth in the sunset glow

seems like a ripe fruit

ready to be gathered by the night.

25. The fist that doubts its wisdom

throttles the voice that would cry.

26. The fist throttles truth

to silence the doubt

of its own wisdom.

27. The man proud of his sect

thinks that he has the sea

ladled into his

own private pond.

28. The mist tries to capture the

morning

in a foolish persistence.

29. The one in its solitude is emptiness,

the other one gives it truth.

30. The pomegranate bud hidden

behind her veil

will burst into passionate flowers

when I am away.

31. The wind brings the call,

the anchor clutches the mud,

the boat beats its breast

against the chain.

32. The worm thinks it foolish

that man does not eat his books.

33. They build a cage and claim thanks

for the security it offers.

34. Thou art late, my crescent moon,

but my night bird is awake to greet you.

35. Thou hast left to the lonely lamp

thy memory in a flame.

36. To bear the cost of the instrument

and never to know that it is

for the music

is the tragedy of life’s deafness.

37. Too ready to blame the bad,

too reluctant to praise the good.

38. Truth smiles in beauty

when she beholds her face

in a perfect mirror.

39. Upon the ruins of tyrant’s triumph

children build their dust castle.

40. When dawn, the many-coloured flower,

fades

the sun as its fruit comes out

in a simple white light.

41. Wishing to hearten a timid lamp

the great night lights all her stars.

42. Across the illimitable hush of time

rings the march music of man.

43. This morning I have my singer’s errand

to the birthday feast of the

honeysuckle.

44. I am the south wind that do not claim honey from the flower,

but only its faint timid whisper.

45. In your kiss, my love,

all my tomorrows merge in an endless today.

46. Why go through life like a child who turns the pages of a book

and believes that this is reading?

47. May the desolate ghost of the forgotten

cease crying to find back its body.

48. The daisy watches the sun

opening out from the dusk

and longs to rival it.

49. Praise frightens me

lest it be proved my debt.

50. I ever wonder when I am before thee,

why I were not made like a forest

that opens its heart in flowers,

like a star in its speech of flame.

51. My love longs to offer its worship in splendour

but poor are its vessels in me.

Let me leave it to her to celebrate love’s feast

whose beauty is lighted with its own bliss,

whose smile is a boon.

52. Gods are amused when the busy river

condemns the cloud as an unpractical dream.

53. God would remain imperfect

if he could not at the same time be a man.

54. Freedom is not gained through the broken walls,

it is captured through the open windows.

55. The large laughter of the morning

is blurred by the miserly mist into a sneer.

56. The man of business claims from the tree its building plan,

and laughs when the tree looks foolish.

57. The mediocre in power barricades himself

with wholesale suspicion against risks

which his stupidity

cannot define.

58. The coward is terribly indiscriminate.

59. The god of the weak is a tyrant.

60. The slave is busy

making whips for his master.

61. Tiredness comes as a bride to the unyielding strength

to kiss it into a surrender.

62. Let me own my defeat to thee my sweet,

and win thee in return.

63. A woman noxious, is vain of her venom

She not only bites but hisses in exultation.

64. A gourmet in gossip uses

indignation as a spice

to enjoy vicarious vice.

65. The devil has his advantage over the divine powers

for, it is easy to heart and

bafflingly hard to heal.

66. The savagery of slander poisons with lies

the arrow-tips of broken facts

to make them meanly perfect.

67. The meaning of the seed waits in the heart of time.

But what is time?

68. The importunate wave pushes away the fruit it longs to capture.

69. The deserted path finds its veil

in the grass that decorates its neglect.

70. Let not my today leave its tattered remnants

to narrow the passage of my tomorrow.

71. My dumb desire tells its beads in the dusk of its loneliness

in a hermit’s cell for my dreams.

72. The mountains dream of a golden age

when they were birds with wings and a voice.

73. Freedom is not overtaken through broken walls

it is welcomed through open gates.

74. The storm that shattered my flower has vanished

but the flower has not died in its death.

 

From ‘MS 460’

75. My nest-weary wings fluttered

In the hesitation dusk of dawn

in answer to the first faint whisper of light

in the East.

76. ‘Seek thy dwelling by the sea’ came the call,

‘Where the earth’s voices blend into music

in the glad heart of the Silent.’

77. The conquering Spirit of Life has only small blades of grass

For its weapon when it goes to meet the mighty Demon of Desert.

78. Bigotry kills Truth in its savage effort to save it.

79. Let my life accept the risk of its sails and not merely the security of its anchor.

80. The sacrifice of leaves blossoms in flowers.

81. Truth when opposed becomes conscious of its triumphant self.

82. They blame the fish for having bones who wants to swallow it.

 

* Nilanjan Banerjee’s publications include Akhono Tui Chinlina Lok (poems in Bengali with illustrations by Jogen Chowdhury), Naughty and Lotus Heart: The Okakura-Priyambada Corespondence (ed.), Galper Nam Rabindranath (in Bengali), Sangini Oi Chitrakala (in Bengali, ed.), Wings of Mistakes: Doodles of Rabindranath Tagore (in press), Three Chancellors: Jawaharlal, Indira and Rajiv (in press).

Footnotes:

1. The Letters of of W.B.Yeats, edited by Allan Wade, London, 1954.

2. See Rabindranath’s letter to Amiya Chakraborty on 26 November 1932, in Bikash Chakraborty, Ingrijite Rabindranath o Anyanna (in Bengali), Puascha, Kolkata, 2010, p. 46.

3. Bikash Chakraborty, Ingrijite Rabindranath o Anyanna (in Bengali), Puascha, Kolkata, 2010, p. 47.