Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems - Hardcover

Tagore, Rabindranath; Barker, Wendy; Tagore, Saranindranath

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807614882 ISBN 13: 9780807614884

Publisher: George Braziller Inc., 2001

Synopsis

The brilliant and immensely prolific Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is known the world over for his accomplished works in an astoundingly wide range of genres: fiction, short stories, poetry, drama, and essays. During the final year of his life, while suffering from the painful illness that would eventually end in his death, Tagore completed four volumes of poetry that expressed the emotional turmoil of facing one's own imminent extinction. Appearing here for the first time in English is a selection of these extraordinary poems that captures as closely as possible the beauty and subtlety of Tagore's original Bengali verses. A marked departure from Tagore's earlier work, these poems are, as the translators say, "so compact that it is almost as if [he]...were going beyond words, as if language no longer suffices, and yet, of course, the language radiates meaning." Poised between life and death, Tagore is awed by the beauty of this world and glimpses in it the presence of the infinite ("Such splendor illuminates a deathlessness/ hidden in the everyday by our senses' limits"). At other times, "alone by sorrow's last window," he is gripped by the sheer terror of experiencing the relentless approach of death. Tagore was so weak at the end that he had to dictate his poems. Although the pain was often excruciating and the fear and anger overwhelming, he still exulted in life. In these poems, from his deathbed, he conveys the intense joy of living and his ultimate triumph over death.

About this title

About the Author

Rabindranath Tagore is one of the twentieth century's most gifted and preeminent literary figures. Asia's first Nobel laureate (1913), Tagore has reached almost legendary status in India, where he is revered among literati and laity alike. Among his works are Gitanjali, The Post Office, Fireflies, and The Crescent Moon. Wendy Barker is professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of four collections of poetry and served this past fall as Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sophia University in Bulgaria. She lives in San Antonio. The great-grandnephew of Rabindranath, Saranindranath Tagore is an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches Indian and European philosophy.

Reviews

Rabindranath Tagore's poetry is notoriously difficult to transport intact from Bengali to English, even when the poet himself was doing the translating. Yet in a new selection of Tagore's Final Poems, written as the poet anticipated death (which came in 1941), Wendy Barker (Way of Whiteness) and Saranindranath Tagore, a great-nephew of Rabindranath and professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, have succeeded wonderfully. The collection is padded with the translators' long preface and introduction, but the 50-odd pages of poems are rife with hard clarity: "Sorrow's dark night over and over/ has come to my door./ Its only visible weapons / pain's deformed poses, fear's monstrous forms / play out their deceptions in darkness."

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The great Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Tagore (1861-1941) was a versatile and unceasingly creative man who wrote in every literary form, composed songs, painted, and achieved renown as an educational reformer. In his introduction to the first English translation of selections from Tagore's last four books, Saranindranath Tagore, the poet's great-grandson and translator, celebrates the poet's life and, along with cotranslator Barker, discusses the difficulties involved in translating Tagore's brilliantly nuanced Bengali into English. But such concerns fall away in the presence of these exquisite poems. Written while Tagore was in extreme pain and moving slowly but inexorably toward death, they are compact, elegant, contemplative, and riveting lyrics that pierce the quiet realm of planets and stars, then dive back to the flowery, noisome Earth, where beauty and ugliness, life and death entwine. Tagore, poignant and wise, ponders love, fear, time, memory, and the porousness of the self in poems of wonder, sorrow, and solace. Hopefully, these precious final works will inspire renewed interest in Tagore's entire oeuvre. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: George Braziller Inc.
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807614882
• ISBN 13: 9780807614884
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104