This publication of or select songs of Tagore, and twelve for those Indian and non-Indian listeners who have no access to the original language of the poet, but enjoy listening to his songs and would like to understand what the song says.
Aruna Chakravarti is the recipient of several prestigious awards. Among them are the Vaitalik Award, the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize and the Sarat Puraskar.
The Nobel Award for Gilanjali surprised and continues to and scholars. Some best poetry such Manasi, Somar Tan and Chitra had appeared prior to Gitanjali If one were to conduct a comparative evaluation of the poems of the carlier anthologies with those of Gitanjali, there is no doubt that the latter would appear somewhat feeble. One wonders why Rabindranath chose to translate, for his foreign readers, the poems Gitanjali, actually a collection of songs, in preference to the ones which, in terms of poetic excellence. were far superior. Could it be because Europe at that time stood on the brink of a devastating world war and its people were staggering under a load of anxiety and depression? Did Rabindranath feel that, at such a juncture, readers were not in a mood for intellectually stimulating poetry? That they would prefer the refreshing, spiritually optimistic verses of Gitanjali which soothed the mind and brought peace probability that was the reasoning behind the choice Rabindranath chose an archaic form English for translation, something like the language of Bible That, perhaps, was an added attraction. Even Yeats and Era Pound, who used robust, modern English for their own poetry, declared themselves spell bound by the oriental poet's quaint, old fashioned expressions. The euphoria, however, was short lived. A few years later Yeats started taking an active dislike both Rabindranath's language and his spiritualize so much so that he instructed the publisher refrain from publishing the Indian poet's other works.
We, who have read the original Gitanjali, do not appreciate the translated version. When Rabindranath wrote in his mother tongue he used the living language a Bengali that, in his hands, became more vigorous and expressive with each new effort. Why did he choose dead, archaic medium for his English translation?
There have been several other attempts at rendering the poems of Gitanjali into English since Rabindranath's own but not one has proved worthwhile. The reason for this obviously, is that translating poetry is far more demanding tasking than translating prose. Translating songs is even more difficult, well nigh impossible.
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