Many admiring readers knowing a number of languages spontaneously agree that Rabindranath Tagore is the greatest poet ever born. We in the Goenka family came to Calcutta two decades before the landmark Pochishe Baisakh (Tagore's birth anniversary) and we continue to be associated with the city. My father, the late Dr Rama Prasad Goenka, grew up at Muktaram Babu Street, an area very close to the Jorasanko Tagore family house. When Tagore breathed his last in 1941, my father was already eleven. Those days there was no caste system regarding those who could appreciate great poetry and it was widely accepted that a successful businessman's grandchild could also aspire to be a poet. The world already knew that Prince Dwarkanath Tagore was one of India's greatest businessmen. The lifelong admiration for his great business and literary neighbours made my father an ardent lover of books in English, Bengali and Hindi.
Even before winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, the Bard of Bengal approached the renowned Sister Nivedita to present his work to people overseas who could read English. That early effort having failed, Tagore made full use of a diary presented to him on the eve of his journey to London by ship, translating some of his greatest writings into English.
The Crescent Moon is based mostly on Shishu, a book of poems on the world of the child, though not all of them can really be called poems for children. It has verses from some other Bengali collections as well. And, as usual, Tagore did not do exact translations of many of his poems, to the extent that some of the English versions deviate quite substantially from the original.
As with The Gardener, Gulzar Saab gave me the great opportunity to read his translations of The Crescent Moon and comment. And as with The Gardener, I took immense liberty to tell him whatever I thought of them. In his characteristic magnanimity, he listened to my views and, in fact, accepted a lot of them. I hope I have the humility not to feel proud of this. I can only express my sense of wonder and admiration at the natural openness of a great mind like his.
Working on the poems of The Crescent Moon had a very special kind of meaning for me. I don't know how to describe it, I can only say that it was all very personal. For instance, as I read the poems of Shishu, not only did I go back to my childhood, reliving the moments of my father reading aloud the poems to me and my sister, I also had a different take on them. While earlier I had just enjoyed the poems, this time a strange sadness came over me as I thought of the little boy and his loneliness, his constant fear of loss, his perennial anxiety of getting separated from his mother.
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