25th Baishakh
Sanyat
Sattar
Rabindranath
Tagore (1861-1941) with his versatile body of works transcends
his identity as a poet, his creativity found its expression
in many forms. 25th Baishakh is his birthday and it is an
occasion to shed light on this multi-faceted giant of Bangla
literature and arts.
Rabindranath
Tagore: Final Poems
Wendy Barker, Sharanindranath Tagore (translator)
George Braziller; April 2001
Rabindranath
Tagore's poetry is notoriously difficult to transport intact
from Bengali to English. Even when the poet himself was
doing the translating, the problem remained. 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.”
Songs
of Kabir
Rabindranath Tagore (translator)
Red Wheel/Weiser; February 2002
Two
years after Tagore's winning the Nobel Prize, this translation
of the Songs of Kabir was published, where he introduced
these mystical poems to the world outside of India. The
poet Kabir, one of the most intriguing and celebrated personalities
in the history of Indian mysticism, lived in the fifteenth
century. He was a great religious reformer who left behind
an exquisite body of poetry of enlightenment that weaves
together the philosophies of Sufism, Hinduism, and the Kabbala.
These poems express a wide range of mystical experience,
from the loftiest abstractions to the most intimate and
personal realization of God, and have become a classic Sufi
text. Rabindranath Tagore's translation work simply captures
the real mystic flavour. Now, for the first time, Andrew
Harvey, one of the leading spiritual writers of our time,
and a renowned translator of mystical texts, has written
an introduction that gives a contemporary context to the
words of Kabir.
Tagore's
Home and the World
P. K. Datta (editor)
Anthem Press; July 2003
This
resourceful volume is a compilation of critical essays on
Rabinrdanath Tagore. Number of world renowned writers have
contributed here discussing various aspects on Tagore's
philosophies and ideologies. His personal life has also
been a very big issue of the discussion. The book is interesting
and is surely a helpful edition for those who want to study
Rabindranath from a deeper context.
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