Poetry · A way to begin
Gitanjali
গীতাঞ্জলি
Rabindranath Tagore · 1910
Synopsis
One hundred and fifty-seven lyric poems, many of them songs, written in the tradition of medieval Indian devotion. The poet addresses God, awaits his coming and offers him his songs; love is the motif that runs through most of them, and a few poems speak of the conflict between the desire for the goods of this world and spiritual thirst.
Context
The Bengali collection appeared in August 1910, at the end of the years in which Tagore had lost his wife, a daughter, his younger son and his father. In 1912 he himself translated part of it into English prose, work he finished on the ship taking him to London; the painter William Rothenstein had Yeats read the manuscript, and Yeats wrote the introduction. The English book, published in November 1912, brings together one hundred and three poems, of which only fifty-three come from this collection, the others from several different books.
Who it is for
Short poems; the Bengali collection and the English selection of 1912, from which the French translation comes, are two different books.
Prizes and reception
The English-language book earned Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first awarded to a non-European writer.
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