The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore - Hardcover

9788126906666: The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8126906669 ISBN 13: 9788126906666

Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors Pvt Ltd, 2008

Tagore's English writings-originals and translations-have not received the attention that they deserve. The purpose of this edition is to make the English writings of Tagore available to the widest possible range of readers interested in the writings of Tagore all over the world, with just the bare, minimum information necessary for appreciating the writings, and leave the critical assessment to the readers themselves. There may be two possible reasons for the neglect of Tagore's English writings. Firstly, Tagore's prolific output, Shakespearean felicity and protean plasticity as a Bengali poet, who, though well-versed in English, chose to write in the medium of his mother tongue for nearly the first fifty years of his life, and there is hardly any literary form that he did not touch upon and turn into gold. His creative genius found expression in poems, plays, novels, essays, short stories, satirical pieces, textbooks for children, and songs of all kinds. The only literary form that he did not try is epic. But in his long, eventful and creative eighty years of life he virtually 'lived' an epic. It is largely due to his mighty stature as a Bengali poet that nobody really bothered about his English writings and his own translations of his own writings. Secondly, it is owing to the supposedly 'poor' quality of his translations subsequent to the translation of Gitanjali. It was only after Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 that there was a growing demand for his writings in the West, and as Tagore was not apparently satisfied by the translations that others-mainly his admirers-made, he began to translate his writings himself. But the tremendous haste with which he had to translate, possibly affected the quality of translations.

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