Gitanjali
by Rabindranath Tagore
Summary
Gitanjali, meaning song offerings, gathers a sequence of devotional lyrics addressed to a divine presence Tagore treats not as a distant, ceremonial god but as something closer to a beloved, a friend, sometimes even a demanding master, spoken to directly in the intimate, unguarded voice of a private conversation rather than a formal prayer. The poems move between longing, doubt, gratitude and a kind of hard won ordinariness, refusing any single fixed picture of the divine and returning instead again and again to the act of offering itself, songs given freely without any guarantee they will be heard or answered. Tagore wrote the original poems in Bengali, drawing on centuries of Indian devotional lyric tradition; the Bengali Gitanjali runs to a hundred and fifty seven poems. He then translated a selection of them into English himself for the 1912 edition, a translation he treated as its own act of creation rather than a strict rendering: he cut lines, merged separate poems and reshaped the prose poem form freely, trading the rhyme and meter of the Bengali originals for a plainer, more direct English voice. The English Gitanjali actually gathers a hundred and three prose poems in total, only fifty three of them drawn from the original Bengali collection, with the remaining fifty pulled in from several other books of his, Gitimalya and Naibedya among them, so the volume Western readers know by this title is really Tagore's own English digest of several years of Bengali work rather than a plain translation of one single book.
Reading Gitanjali in English means reading Tagore's own reworking of his poems for a foreign audience as much as the poems themselves, and it suits a reader drawn to short, unhurried devotional verse meant to be read a few pages at a time rather than straight through; its intimacy comes through best slowly, the way a private conversation would.
Historical Context & Significance
The poet W. B. Yeats read Tagore's English manuscript in London before its 1912 publication and wrote the introduction that helped carry Gitanjali to a wide Western readership almost immediately, and the following year the Swedish Academy awarded Tagore the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, its citation praising his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse and the consummate skill with which he had made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West. Tagore became the first writer from outside Europe to win the literature prize.
In 1915 he accepted a British knighthood, only to renounce it publicly four years later in protest at the Amritsar massacre, writing to the British viceroy that the disproportionate severity of the punishment inflicted on unarmed people left him no honest choice but to stand, stripped of any special distinction, beside his own countrymen. Gitanjali remains the work that introduced Tagore to readers outside India and the one still most closely tied to his name abroad.