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Rabindranath Tagore

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Selected Poems Paperback – June 1, 1995

by Rabindranath Tagore (Author), William Radice (Translator)

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Acclaimed by Forster and Pound, for Yeats the poet whose poetry 'stirred my blood as nothing has for years', Tagore was and remains India's greatest writer this century. Prolific and innovatory as a poet, novelist, dramatist, musician and painter, he was also a leading figure in the Nationalist movement, an intimate of Gandhi, a vastly influential educationalist and philosopher and a luminary in world culture. William Radice's selections and translations from the Bengali reintroduce Tagore to a new generation of Western readers.

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An important book... William Radice s introduction is excellent. --(The Sunday Times, London)

About the Author

Rabindranath Tagore (18611941), one of Indias greatest and most prolific writers of the twentieth century, was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.
William Radice is a poet, scholar, and translator of Bengali, who has written or edited nearly thirty books. He has translated Tagores short stories and his novel The Home and the World for Penguin Classics.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; 1st edition (June 1, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140183663
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140183665
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,860,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #115,842 in Poetry (Books)
- #198,056 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.0 26 ratings

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Rabindranath Tagore

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Rabindranath Tagore was a Nobel Laureate for Literature (1913) as well as one of India’s greatest poets and the composer of independent India’s national anthem, as well as that of Bangladesh. He wrote successfully in all literary genres, but was first and foremost a poet, publishing more than 50 volumes of poetry. He was a Bengali writer who was born in Calcutta and later traveled around the world. He was knighted in 1915, but gave up his knighthood after the massacre of demonstrators in India in 1919.

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Sujoy Gupta

An Excellent Overview of Tagore

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2000

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the outstanding Bengali poet, literateur and humanist (and Asia's first Nobel Laureate in 1913), is scarcely read outside his native Bengal because only a small fraction of his works have been translated from Bengali into English or indeed into other languages. English translations were those done by Tagore himself and by a few Bengali literary scholars well-versed in English. The arrival of Dr William Radice on the scene of Bengali scholarship in the early eighties brought in a current of fresh air. Here was an Englishman admiring Tagore and translating him! In this book, Radice applies his deep perception of Tagore in putting together a bouquet, as it were, redolent with the exotic fragrance of Tagoreana. No single collection can ever do justice to Tagore, and this one doesn't either. However, it does give the English-knowing reader a vivid glimpse of Tagore's amazing creativity. Radice has done a good job of choosing competent translators who have applied their hearts to the task -- Tagore is so subtle that it is enormously difficult to translate him! This book is strongly recommended for readers of all nationalities.

28 people found this helpful

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Sambarta Rakshit

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2003

Radice's translations do injustice to Tagore and books such as this one (along with Tagore's own inadequate transations of his work) might end up misleading Western critics. The strength of his poetry is in his command on language, the musicality of his verse and, in general, the formal perfection of his work. Although some of his later work was in free verse, Tagore was undoubtedly a formalist. He took the metrical and rhythmic patterns of classical Sanskrit poetry and also traditional narrative Bengali verse and either retained them or experimented with them by splitting whole units into shorter lines (consider, for example, Balaka) as dictated by needs of movement and development. One of the almost insurmountable difficulties of translating formal poetry is that meter (along with sonic devices) is inextricably linked to meaning and the translator, somehow, has to convey both.
This is where Radice fails miserably. Let me simply cite the opening two lines of his translation of "Golden Boat" (Shonar Tari) along with the original.
Translation:
Clouds rumbling in the sky; teeming rain.
I sit on the river bank, sad and alone.
Original:
gagane garaje megh ghana barasha
kule eka boshe achhi, nahi bharasha
In Bengali, unlike in English, it is the consonant count (note that joint consonants are counted as one) and not the syllable count that defines a given meter. Here, we have a truncated fourteen-beat meter with a caesura after the eigth beat. The "ga" sounds are onomatopoeic, after the roaring of the clouds. Subsequently, the use of softer consonants indicates a draining of tension and reflects the loss of hope on the part of the narrator. Radice's version lacks any discernible meter and most importantly, the cohesion of sound and sense. The only device he uses is a slant rhyme and this, by itself, falls short of conveying the music of Tagore's verse. Other weaknesses include the unhappy gerund and the prosaic modifiers.
Although the loss of formalism remains the primary failing of Radice's translations, there are other drawbacks. Reading Tagore aloud is always a pleasure because language in his hands is not only expression but can be read for sound alone. Those long polysyllabic compounds, the internal rhymes, the effortless alliteration are always a delight, no matter what the content, be it some his later abstruse works (of which I am not particularly fond) or his purely narrative poems. Radice's translations lack this linguistic richness and are bland for the most part. Worse, he has a penchant for cliches ("bright as a million suns", "sea of joy surges through his heart" etc.). One might as well ask, "What is the point?"
Submitted incognito, these poems would be rejected by even middling journals. I can only guess what impressions critics unfamiliar with Bengali might form of Tagore's work, particularly in relation to his contemporaries, Yeats, Pounds and Stevens. I would refer them to selected translations by Radice's wife, Ketaki Kushari Dyson. "I won't let you go" (Jete nahi dibo), in particular, is well rendered.

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in India on March 15, 2018

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good

One person found this helpful

F. J. Lacey

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2017

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Different cover though?

One person found this helpful

Antionette

No star

Reviewed in Germany on September 30, 2018

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am extremely disappointed about the quality of the book. While placing order it’s only possible to see the layout, not the content and inside layouts. The book was bought for 300 Indian rupees and sold for 12 euro 50 , the price doesn’t justify anyway the poor quality. It’s understandable that seller should make profit, then sell proper items. I had no other choice this time so I kept it and not recommend to buy this book to anyone.

K.J. Cleetus

The translator has achieved a fine balance

Reviewed in India on January 7, 2015

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Translations by poets like William Radice have added a new verve to the poetry of Rabindranath; his copious notes enhance the appreciation of certain poems. William Radice, a modern translator of Rabindranath Tagore, says:
Tagore's capacity for scepticism, mockery, and hard-headed rationality contributes just as much to his realism as does his awareness of grief and suffering.

William Radice in 'Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems' has translated 48 poems, selecting 16 each from the early, middle and late period of the poet's life. Radice is an English poet and translator of many books from Bengali. His is the first of the modern translations that try to render what is in the poems of Rabindranath without glossing over the difficulties. At the back he provides extensive notes to each poem: the original title in Bengali, the volume of Rabindranath's verse from which it is taken, the political background of the times, the poet's state of health, the place it was written, and what events occasioned the poem, and where it was first published. The notes refer to the original Bengali words often, to explicate their significance. It is a very thorough work and I hope it presages many more such efforts to come.

Ketaki Kushari Dyson’s comments on Radice's work (Rabindranath Tagore, Particles, Jottings, Sparks, The Collected Brief Poems) are illuminating and expert. She says “sheer brevity and tautness of construction can be a trap in some of these aphoristic poems.“ She commends Radice's translation of the more romantic poems in the collection with these words: “the translator has achieved a fine balance of ‘faithfulness’ to the source poems, innovative and imaginative ways of resolving problems, and an inspired choice of words and rhythms by means of which the re-created poems explode into little coruscating circles of meaning and evocation in the new language.” High compliments indeed.

3 people found this helpful

Priyanka sharma

Five Stars

Reviewed in India on October 28, 2015

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Great poems

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