Gîtãnjalî

A Personal Sãdharnã

William Radice

"They (songs) were an expression of my innermost feelings, they were my humblest

— Tagore

In the various letters in which Rabindranath Tagore talked about his most famous book
Gîtãnjalî, he always stressed the personal character of the poems. For example, in a letter
that he wrote to his niece Indira Devi from London on 6 May 1913 about the origins of the
English Gîtãnjalî, he said of its songs: "They were an expression of my innermost feelings :
they were my humblest prayers, my sincerest sãdhanã, and a reflection of joys and sorrows.'
In a letter to his close friend, the English painter William Rothenstein, he wrote: "These poems
of mine are very different from other literary productions of the kind. They are revelations of
my true self to me. The literary man was a mere amanuensis - very often knowing nothing of
the true meaning of what he was writing.”

For anyone who knows and loves Gîtãnjalî, whether in the original Bengali or in Tagore's own
English translation, this emphasis on the personal will not come as a surprise. Personal these,
poems clearly are, a kind of interior monologue in which Tagore wrestles with fundamental
questions of life and death, man and God, despair and hope. But was this deep interiority,
this self-revelation well understood when the English Gîtãnjalî was first published in 1912?
When the India Society edition in London was quickly followed by the Macmillan edition
in 1913, and when the acclaim it received led rapidly to the award of the Nobel Prize for
Literature to Tagore in that year, did the readers of Tagore's own English translation or of the
numerous secondary translations that were done into other languages fully understand and
appreciate how personal these poems were?
In his highly influential Introduction to the book, W. B. Yeats did not read the poems in
that way. He wrote:
The work of a supreme culture. they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil
as the grass and the rushes. A tradition. where poetry and religion are the same thing. has
passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion,
and carried back again to the multitude, the thought to the scholar and the noble.

Finding in Tagore the same ideals that he wanted the Irish literary renaissance to espouse, and
also seeing him as a perfect embodiment of the Vedantic religious philosophy that had recently
been preached in Dublin by Mohini Chatterjce, Yeats saw Tagore not really as a person, but
as a type, a symbol, an icon. That prophetic, iconic image, which Tagore himself did much to
promote through his impressive robes and long hair and beard, became inseparable from his
worldwide fame. Quite quickly he began to feel trapped by it, and the fame, the image, the
charisma, became an enormous burden to him.

When I started working on my new translation of Gîtãnjalî, commissioned by Penguin

reading: one has to internalize everything that the poet felt and thought when he wrote the
poem, and try to make the poem come alive again in a different language. One has to employ

all one's creative and imaginative faculties, just as if one was writing original poems of
one's own. The personal nature of the poems became apparent not just in their content, but
in
the simple fact that they required almost no annotation or commentary. Of course, a
number
of cultural and literary traditions can be detected in the poems and songs of Gîtãnjalî. The
Bengali Vaishnava tradition, with its great heritage of songs expressing the love of Radha
and Krishna; the poetry and spirituality of the Upanisads: the religious universalism of the
Brãhmo Samãj, the nineteenth century religious and social reform movement to which the
Tagore family belonged: all of these could be brought in to a commentary on Gîtãnjalî if
one wished to write one. But this is not necessary in the way it would be if the poems were
indeed 'the work of a supreme culture' rather than the expression of a deeply sensitive and
often suffering individual. Compare my Gîtãnjalî book with the translation 1 have done,
also for Penguin India, of 'The Poem of the Killing of Meghnãd' (Meghnãdbadh kãbya) by
Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1871). This great work from the Bengal Renaissance, the
150th anniversary of whose publication in 1861, we are also celebrating in 2011, is so
steeped in multiple literary traditions – classical, medieval, Indian and Western – that a
massive amount of annotation and commentary is inevitable. It is Meghnãdbadh kãbya,
that is, in its way, ‘the expression of a supreme culture’, whether the Bengal Renaissance
or of India, or of epic poetry both Indian and Western. Gîtãnjalî is not like that; it requires
hardly any footnotes at all.
What I found it did require, however, was a, detailed and sensitive investigation of the
relationship between the English Gîtãnjalî; and Tagore’s Bengali sources, and a clear
historical understanding of how his translations were done and what changes were made
between his manuscript of the translations and the text of Gîtãnjalî as published in 1912.
This aspect of the book became a most unexpected voyage of discovery. When I arrived at
Santiniketan at the end of August 2010 as a Visiting Professor for three months, I had only
completed translations of 41 of the 103 poems in Gîtãnjalî so 1 knew I had a lot more to do.
But I quickly found I needed to do more than complete the translations. When I looked at
Tagore's manuscript of Gîtãnjalî, which survives in a 'notebook in blue roan' preserved with
the Rothenstein papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard, I found extraordinary
differences between it and the published text. Bengali critics such as Shyamal Kumar
Sarkar and Saurindra Mitra have looked closely at differences in phrasing between the
manuscript and the published text; but no one has given thought to differences that are
more fundamental than that. The manuscript of Gîtãnjalî — known as the 'Rothenstein
manuscript' — consists of a main sequence of 83 translations. I have no doubt that this
sequence was carefully and coherently planned by Tagore. The manuscripts that we have
are not rough drafts: they look much more like fair copies of drafts that he began in
Silaidah in 1911 and completed in Santiniketan before his departure for England in June
1917. On the voyage to England he went on filling a second exercise-book with more
translations. This second exercise-book is lost: hut clearly when he arrived in England
Rothenstein and other English friends were impressed by those translations as well as by
the main sequence in the roan notebook, and they must have suggested to Tagore that more
poems could be added. 80 of the 83 main sequence were ultimate used: another three
translations that were written on spare pages at the end of the notebook were also included
(there were in fact translations of poems from his book of poems about children, Ŝiŝu,
which was the basis of his later English book The Crescent Moon 1913). A further 20 were
added from miscellaneous sources. These were mixed up with poems from the main
sequence to produce an order that was totally different. In my Introduction to my new
translation, I explain why I think that the new order was in many ways a travesty of what
Tagore had originally intended. It lacked any kind of logic; and it destroyed the element of
sãdhanã, the spiritual striving or unfolding which speaks very strongly from the main
sequence of poems as preserved in the Rothenstein manuscript.

Another fundamental way in which the manuscript was changed was that much shorter
paragraphs were introduced, so that most of the poems in the published Gîtãnjalî acquired
the character of 'verses' in the English Bible. The poems that were taken from the book
Naibedra ('Offerings', 1901) are a particularly extreme example. In the original Bengali they
are compact, 14-line sonnets: in Tagore's translations in the manuscript they are presented as
single paragraphs of prose: but in the published Gîtãnjalî they are broken up into short
verses. The famous "Where the mind is without fear" is the poem that will immediately
spring to mind, but there are many others too.
A third way in which Tagore's conception of translation was altered was in the punctuation.
Vastly more commas were introduced than Tagore had himself used. Tagore, who had
such a wonderful ear for rhythm and phrasing in language, whether he was writing in his
mother tongue Bengali, or in English, always used punctuation with the rhythm in mind.
He did not place commas according to conventional rules. In the published Gîtãnjalî, commas
were introduced wherever possible, and in particular the use of commas before 'and'
contributed greatly to the 'biblical' impression that Tagore's translations gave, for the use of
commas in that way is typical of the English bible ('In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God', etc.).

Finally, many changes were made to Tagore's vocabulary and phrasing. In my view, at least
two-thirds of these changes were unnecessary. In my book, I have given a detailed analysis of
these changes in the form of a table, with notes on many details in the table. My conclusion
is, that of the 300 or so changes that were made (this figure includes changes to punctuation).
only 27 were strictly necessary, and moreover there are at least 20 obvious errors in the
English which should have been corrected but were left unchanged.
Who was responsible for all these changes? How was it that a translation which when Tagore
first did it clearly meant a lot to him was, as it were, taken out of his control'? The finger has to
point to W.B. Yeats (I 865-1939). Although some critics have argued that Tagore was capable
of making changes himself, and might indeed have done so before handing over to Yeats a
typed copy of his translations on which Yeats then made his emendations — a typed copy
which has unfortunately not survived. But all the evidence that I have examined indicates
that Yeats was responsible, that he resented input from any of Tagore's other friends, and
that Tagore himself, overwhelmed by the appreciation that lie had received in London. and
particularly from W. B. Yeats was not in a position either to resist Yeats's emendations or
suggest alternatives of his own.

Later. Tagore became very ambivalent about his own translations. In my Introduction I quote a
number of letters in which he expressed doubts about his own command of English. And
regrets that he had done the translations at all. The translations that followed Gîtãnjalî did most
certainly decline in quality; Tagore did them largely to meet an international demand, his heart was no
longer in them. But I am convinced that when he did the translations in Gîtãnjalî on his own, before
Yeats muscled in, he found an intense joy in that process. In a letter to J. D. Anderson in 1918 he
spoke of ‘a magic which seems to transmute my Bengali Verses into something which is original again
in a different manner'. When I read Tagore's translations in the original manuscript, I am able to sense that
magic. Moreover, I find that when they are presented with the original paragraphing their sparing use of commas,
and the words and phrases that Tagore originally came up with himself (even though there were places,
where slight corrections did need to be made to articles, prepositions, etc.), I sense a rhythm and energy which is
not so very far from what can be found in the Bengali originals.

I have. therefore, , in my new translation for Penguin India, supplied an entirely new text of
Tagore’s English translation to run in parallel with my own new translations of all the poems
and songs. My hope is that the two will be read in counterpoint, and will offer an experience
that is fresh and totally different from what has been previously experienced in any text or translation of Tagore's
poetic works. By doing this, and by carefully reflecting in my translations the differences of style that can be found
between the types of poems and songs that Tagore included in the book, and by indicating which of the poems are
poems and which are songs, I will have come closer to Gîtãnjalî ‘s personal sãdhanã.

That sãdhanã became, as _I worked on the book with relentless intensity in September and October 2010, a
kind of sãdhanã of my own. It will never be easy to detach from it mentally from the simple fact that soon after I
arrived in Santiniketan I fell and fractured and dislocated my right wrist, so the whole book had to be completed
without the use of my right arm. Such was the creative energy that drove it along, it perhaps would have turned
out much the same even if I had had the use of both arms. Nevertheless, when one is battling with major
constraints, a creative endeavor will inevitably take on more of the character of a personal striving than it would if
one was doing it in the best of health.
Tagore himself was not in the best of health when he did the translations that were later to achieve such success.
Indeed he had postponed his planned visit to England because of illness, and had withdrawn to his family estates
in Silaidah in North Bengal to recuperate. As is well known, he started the translations as a way of distracting
himself from his lassitude. Moreover, physical illness had come in the wake of a series of crushing bereavements,
the loss of his wife, his daughter, his son, his father, and of a beloved young teacher at Santiniketan. As an
epigraph to my book I quoted two lines from Gîtãnjalî No. 83: tomãr sonãr thãlãr sãjãba ãj dukkher
aŝrydhãr. These are difficult lines to translate but they speak of decorating the golden plate in which a puja-
offering is made with 'the stream of sorrow's tears'. My broken wrist was of course utterly trivial compared to
what Tagore himself had suffered. But it did perhaps help me to enter — more deeply than might have been
otherwise possible — the personal sãdhanã that was and still is Gîtãnjalî.

*
The author has pursued a career as a poet, scholar and Bengali translator. He has authored/ edited several
books. He has translated Tagore's Selected Poems and Selected Short Stories, Penguin. He has also published
several volumes of Poetry, including Frameworks: Four Metaphysical Poems' and 'The Dancing Mouse'.