Juan Mascaró (1897-1987), the Mallorcan translator of the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Dhammapada into English for the Penguin Classics series, also compiled a unique book of aphorisms and reflections called The Creation of Faith. Mascaró left Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and settled in England. I got to know him and his wife Kathleen very well, and he was a major influence on my work. When he died, I prepared The Creation of Faith for publication.¹ I chose an aphorism from the book, ‘The universal is personal’, as an epigraph to a book of my own poems.² The book was dedicated to Kathleen Mascaró, and its title The Retreat was also the name of their house in the village of Comberton, near Cambridge.

‘The universal is personal’ seems to me helpful as a guide to reading and understanding the works of Rabindranath Tagore. Personal/universal; finite/infinite; earth/sky; real/ideal; time/eternity; male/female, West/East… Tagore’s thinking and writing revolved round opposites of that kind. In his Jibansmriti (‘My Reminiscences’, 1917), he spoke of ‘the subject on which all my writings have dwelt: the infinite in the finite and the finite in the infinite.’ In The Religion of Man (1931), he defined art as ‘the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the real.’ The ‘real’ for Tagore incorporated both the transcendent and the immanent. It made him a writer of poems and songs that reach out to a Spirit that is ever real, ever present though always out of reach. But it also made him a writer of stories and novels that focus with great insight on real, down-to-earth human experience. His greatest works do both at the same time. One of the best-loved examples of ‘the infinite in the finite’ is his poem Tal-gach (‘Palm-tree’, 1922), which every Bengali schoolchild learns by heart. The tossing of the branches of the tree in the breeze represents its longing for the sky:

It thinks, Maybe my leaves are feathers,

and nothing stops me now

from rising on their flutter.

 

But when the wind dies down

the mind of the tree returns

To earth, recalls that earth is its mother:

and then it likes once more

its earthly corner.³

While working on my new translation of Tagore’s most famous book, Gitanjali, I became acutely aware of oscillations between the personal and the universal in its poems and songs.⁴ Gitanjali became internationally known through Tagore’s own translation, edited and introduced by W.B. Yeats. It was published in a limited edition by the India Society in London in November 1912, and soon afterwards – following its sell-out success – by Macmillan in March 1913. It led directly to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Tagore in November 1913.

 

Even though the book has circulated for nearly a century in numerous editions and secondary translations, its origins and relationship to Tagore’s Bengali writings have not been well understood. In 1910, he published a book of lyrical poems in Bengali, many of which were songs, with the title Gitanjali. Fifty-three of the 103 poems in this book were chosen for inclusion in his English book, Gitanjali: Song Offerings. The rest were taken from ten other books altogether, so the English Gitanjali is actually quite a miscellaneous collection or anthology, despite its appearance of unity.

The story of how the book reached its published form is complicated, and I have investigated it in detail in the Introduction and Appendices to my book. Before arriving in England in June 1912, Tagore wrote out eighty-three translations of his poems and songs in a notebook which he later gave to his friend, the English painter William Rothenstein. Known as ‘the Rothenstein manuscript’, the notebook has been preserved among the Rothenstein papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard. The eighty-three come from four books – Gitanjali (1910), Gitimalya (1914), Naibedya (1901) and Kheya (1906) and one play, Achalayatan (1912). In my view, the book as first conceived by Tagore in his manuscript was balanced and coherent in its selection and arrangement.

 

On the voyage to England, Tagore went on translating poems and songs, filling a second notebook which is now lost. Rothenstein, Yeats and other friends in London were as impressed by these translations as they were by the ones in the first notebook, and they must have urged him to include them when the publication of Gitanjali became a possibility. The selection, sequence, paragraphing, punctuation and phrasing were considerably altered under Yeats’s editorship. The sequence of events was so rapid that it would have been very difficult for Tagore to control it, even if he had wished to. Because the book was such a success, he felt obliged thereafter to acknowledge his debt to Yeats. In a letter to Rothenstein of 26 November 1932, he wrote:

I am sure you will remember with what reluctant hesitation I gave up to your hand my manuscript of Gitanjali feeling sure that my English was of that amorphous kind for whose syntax a school-boy could be reprimanded. The next day you came rushing to me with assurance which I dare not take seriously and to prove to me the competence of your literary judgement you made three copies of those translations and sent them to Stopford Brooke, Bradley and Yeats. The letter which Bradley sent you in answer left no room for me to feel diffident about the merit of those poems and Stopford Brooke’s opinion also was a corroboration. These were enthusiastic as far as I remember. But even then I had no doubt that it was not the language but the earnest feeling expressed in a simple manner which touched their hearts. That was aptly enough for a foreigner and the unstinted praise offered to me by those renowned critics was a great deal more than I could ever expect. Then came those delightful days when I worked with Yeats and I am sure the magic of his pen helped my English to attain some quality of permanence…⁵ 

But in many of his English and Bengali letters Tagore is ambivalent about his English translations and the whole western and international career that depended on them. He often expressed regret that he had done them at all, usually claiming when he was in that mood that his English was not good enough.

 

In my new book, I have argued that much of Tagore’s ambivalence about Gitanjali and the books that followed it derived from a deep-seated (and thus not explicitly expressed) feeling that it had been taken out of his hands. When the English poet Robert Bridges wanted to make some changes to poems from Gitanjali he had chosen for an anthology called The Spirit of Man, Tagore fought back a bit, writing in another letter to Rothenstein:

Of course, at that time I could never imagine that anything that I could write would find its place in your literature. But the situation is changed now. And if it be true that Yeats’ touches have made it possible for Gitanjali to occupy the place it does then that must be confessed. At least by my subsequent unadulterated writings my true level should be found out and the faintest speck of lie should be wiped out from the fame I enjoy now. It does not matter what the people think of me but it does matter all the world to me to be true to myself. This is the reason why I cannot accept any help from Bridges accepting where the grammar is wrong or wrong words have been used. My translations are frankly prose – my aim is to make them simple with just a suggestion of rhythm to give them a touch of the lyric, avoiding all archaisms and poetical conventions.⁶ 

 

The phrase, it does matter all the world to me to be true to myself, becomes poignant and significant when one realizes how deeply personal the Gitanjali poems and songs were to Tagore. The whole ‘Gitanjali phase’, as Bengali critics have called it, was an extremely prolific rediscovery of his own creativity that followed an appalling series of bereavements: the deaths of his wife in 1902, his daughter Renuka six months later, Satischandra Ray (a dear young colleague at Santiniketan) in 1904, his father in 1905, and his younger son Samindranath in 1907. The modernist Bengali poet and critic Buddhadeva Bose described the phase very well:

It is on record that while composing the Bengali lyrics, he was like a haunted man, roaming at night among the shal trees of Santiniketan, filling pages while travelling by trains or bullock carts, piling up as many as five or six during a single day. Of this mood of rapture it seems these translations were a by-product: we should note that in the spring and summer of 1912 he was at the same time translating and writing new pieces in Bengali.⁷

In speaking of the poems and songs he selected for translation, Tagore several times stressed their personal nature. To William Rothenstein on 30 December 1912, he wrote: ‘These poems of mine are very different from other literary productions of the kind. They are revelations of my true self to me. The literary man was a mere amanuensis – very often knowing nothing of the true meaning of what he was writing…’ To his niece Indira Devi on 6 May 1913 (a letter that gives a much-quoted account of the genesis of his translations), he wrote: ‘They were an expression of my inmost feelings, they were my humblest prayers, my sincerest sadhana, and a reflection of my joys and sorrows.’⁸ 

 

How well was this understood when Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize raised Tagore to the pinnacle of world fame? In Yeats’s eloquent Introduction, which very much set the tone for the appreciation of Tagore internationally, there is very little emphasis on the personal. Instead, Tagore is seen as an iconic representative of an ancient culture whose values Yeats adopted as a model for the Irish literary revival that he wished to lead:

These lyrics – which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention – display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble…

Yeats had no knowledge of the complex and sophisticated hybrid culture of nineteenth century Bengal to which the Tagore family belonged. Although various Indian and Bengali cultural and literary traditions – the Upanishads, the Vaishnava cult of Radha’s love for Krishna, the songs of the wandering Bauls – have footprints in Gitanjali, Tagore’s poems and songs are not at all traditional in form or style. Like writers in Europe from the Renaissance on, he picked and adapted traditions according to his need, and brought in many features that were entirely new. His works were not the impersonal products of a culture in the manner of the poets of medieval (pre-modern) Bengal, many of whom were anonymous.

 

The western obsession – still alive today – with seeing Tagore in iconic terms, as a representative of the mystic East or philosophia perennia undoubtedly became a burden for him. There are poems in Gitanjali that are startlingly prophetic of the price that he paid for fame. Here are two that in the Rothenstein manuscript are – with striking significance – placed consecutively. The first one became No. 29 in the published text. The second one was – along with two others – omitted, for reasons unknown. I give them here in my new translation and also in the new text that I have done of Tagore’s translation, which alternates with mine in my book and keeps as close as possible to the manuscript:

MS 32

He who by my name is kept in hiding

Within the prison of that name is dying.

Everything else by day and night forgetting,

Towards the sky that name forever piling,

I lose within its dark

My own true spark.

 

Dust on dust, layer on layer impacting,

Higher and higher that name of mine I’m rearing.

Lest anywhere a crack or hole is forming,

My heart is ever fearful and unresting.

As I this lie refine,

I lose what’s mine.

He, whom I enclose with my name, is dying in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around and as this name scales the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

I take pride in this rampart of my prison and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.

MS 33

The day you wipe out

my name, lord,

that day I’ll be free.

I’ll be re-born in you

instead of in a dream

made by me.

Your writing’s crossed out

by the line

of my name.

How much longer

must I carry the evil

of that kind of fame?

 

It steals clothes from others

for its own

fancy dress;

It stamps on all

other music

itself to express.

Enough of this name!

I’ll take only yours

to my lips.

I’ll become one with all

when my name

into namelessness slips.

On the day thou breakest through this my name, my master, I shall be free and leave this phantasy of my own creation and take my place in thee.

By scribbling my name over thy writing I cover thy works. I know not how far such a horror could be carried.

This pride of name plucks feathers from others to decorate its own self and to drown all other music it beats its own drum. Oh, let it be utterly defeated in me and let the day come when only thy name will play in my tongue and I shall be accepted by all by my nameless recognition.

Tagore’s desire – strongly apparent in the second poem – to merge his identity with the identity of God takes us to the philosophic heart of his engagement with both the personal and the universal. I will return to that point at the end of this paper, but first let me consider Tagore’s relevance today, in the light of the personal nature of the Gitanjali poems – evident in these as in all the other poems, but strangely overlooked by Yeats and his other western admirers in his lifetime.

 

There is no doubt that the name and fame that came to trap Tagore as a man and individual were partly his own creation. Yes, his foreign admirers found in him what they wanted to find, but he also gave them what they wanted.

Firstly, his way of translating his poems, even if Yeats had a lot to do with establishing its style and tone, disguised both the formal variety (Gitanjali is essentially a mixture of songs or song-like poems, 14-line sonnets, and ballad-like poems in strophic form) and the emotional turbulence of the book. For reasons that I personally find rather baffling, he was perceived in the West as a poet of serene self-mastery. If you read the manuscript of Gitanjali – or my new text based on the manuscript – you will find that the effect is anything but calm. The poems hurtle from one emotion to another, bouncing off each other or suddenly changing the mood quite violently.

Secondly, the universalist philosophy that Tagore expounded in his many lectures and essays, with its promotion of international peace, the education of the child in harmony with nature, and its avoidance of any kind of religious sectarianism, soon attracted more attention than his poetry. When audiences all over the world flocked to hear Tagore, they came essentially for a message, not for a literary experience.

Thirdly, his unique and charismatic appearance, with his long beard and long (pan-Asian?) robes designed by himself, seemed to disconnect him from the society and culture of Bengal in which he was actually firmly rooted.

 

In this 150th anniversary year, in which numerous events are being organized worldwide to celebrate Tagore’s genius, it is already clear that for many of the organizers the message continues to be paramount. The assumption seems to be that Tagore remains relevant because he had many ideas – about education, the environment, religion, consumerism, nationalism and more – that resonate with our contemporary anxieties and ideals. Whenever I am asked about Tagore’s relevance today, I am expected to speak about such matters. Often I am willing to do so, as I do not deny that his ideals are of great relevance, and that many of his finest works are prophetic of our current predicament.

But with any great writer or artist, are ideals and ideas enough? For me, as a translator of Tagore’s literary works over the last four decades, Tagore is relevant today because he was a great creative artist – a poet above all, but also a writer of songs, stories, novels, plays, and a pioneering painter too.

In a lecture that I gave in March 2011 in Copenhagen and Lund on the relevance of Tagore’s literature today, I identified six qualities that make his works so rewarding to read and translate: clarity, rationality, depth of feeling, rhythmic power, far-sightedness and adaptability. I illustrated these qualities with extracts, ending with part of a DVD of Param Vir’s remarkable opera Snatched by the Gods, whose libretto by me is based on my translation of his electrifying narrative poem Debatar gras.⁹ 

 

A quality of intimacy could well be added to the list. What makes Tagore so dear and so special to his compatriots, his fellow-Bengalis? Ask them this, and they will not start talking about his message, or at least not initially. They are much more likely to mention his songs. It is Rabindrasangeet, the songs of Tagore that – most profoundly among all his works – combine the personal with the universal. Bengalis love the songs because, when they hear or sing them, they become one with the poet and his feelings. Every song by Tagore is an expression both of the poet’s feelings and of the feelings of his listeners.

The songs are also the works by him that brought him closest to the divine. I have argued in another lecture that in his songs, Tagore succeeded in being both a dualist and a monist. In their words and imagery they are most dualist or dvaita, because they are mostly concerned with relationship – between man and woman, or the human and the divine. But in their music, they are non-dualist, advaita.¹⁰

As a poet and poet-musician (rather than as a mystic or saint), Tagore found a way of resolving a conundrum that was part of the Indian spiritual heritage and which he also felt strongly himself, but which was very difficult to put into words. The conundrum is: that our deepest self or atman – that which gives us our consciousness and identity – is ultimately the same as Brahman or the universal Spirit on which the whole universe depends for its existence. The fact that this age-old idea both fascinated and puzzled him is confirmed by the fact that he wrote no less than three, late, complex poems with the title Ami (‘I’). The first is in his book Parisesh (1932), the second is in Sesh Saptak (1935) and the third is in Syamali (1936). There is no space to discuss these poems here – that is something I would like to do in a future article. But the sheer fact that he wrote them, that they wrestle head-on with the relationship between the personal and the universal, shows how crucial it was to him to be both.

 

It seems to me that the correct balancing of the personal and the universal is vital to our understanding of Tagore, whether our interest in him is primarily focused on his message or on his creative achievements. He will not be relevant to us today or in future ages unless we perceive his universality. But we will not understand his universality properly unless we understand how personally and locally it was expressed. Gitanjali started his international career, and Gitanjali is, a hundred years later, a good place at which to begin reading Tagore again – so long as we can come close to what was actually in his mind when he wrote and translated its poems and songs.

 

Footnores:

1. Juan Mascaró, The Creation of Faith/ La Creació de la Fe, with an Introduction by William Radice. Editorial Moll, Palma de Mallorca, 1994; Rupa & Co., Delhi, 1995; Bayeux Arts, Calgary, 1999.

2. The Retreat: Poems, 1984-88, University Press Ltd., Dhaka, 1994.

3. My translation. Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems, Penguin, 1985, p. 87.

4. Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali: Song Offerings, a new translation by William Radice, with an Introduction, and a new text of Tagore’s translation based on his manuscript. Penguin India, New Delhi, 2011. Commissioned by Penguin India for the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.

5. The complete letter can be found in Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore 1911-1941, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Mary M. Lago, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972, pp. 345-6.

6. 4 April 1915. Ibid, p. 195.

7. ‘Tagore in Translation’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Vol. 3, 1963, p. 25.

8. See Uma Das Gupta (ed.), My Life in My Words, Penguin India, Delhi, 2006, p. 161.

9. My translation of the poem can be found in my Penguin Selected Poems of Tagore (1985). Born in Delhi, Param Vir is now a very well established figure in the world of contemporary music. The opera was commissioned by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich Biennale in 1992, and has been performed in many European cities in several different productions, along with its companion opera, Broken Strings (based on a Jataka tale, libretto by David Rudkin). The success of the opera is one indication among many that Tagore is likely to become an increasingly rich resource. With the Asian cultural heritage now catching up with the European and American in terms of global influence, I am convinced we will see his works being used more and more.

10. See ‘Painting the Dust and the Sunlight: Rabindranath Tagore and the Two Gitanjalis’ in Amalendu Biswas, Christine Marsh and Kalyan Kundu (eds.), Rabindranath Tagore: A Timeless Mind, The Tagore Centre UK, London, 2011, pp. 277-88.