Is his poetry any good? The answer for anyone who can't read Bengali must be: don't know. No translation is up to the job
by Ian Jack
Courtesy: The Guardian
Rabindranath Tagore became the embodiment of how the west wanted to see the east. Photograph: Hulton Archive
(May 07, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Rabindranath Tagore was born 150 years ago today. This weekend festivities and seminars are being held in his honour across the world. In London, the BFI is hosting a season of films inspired by his work; last night his fellow Bengali (and fellow Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen gave a talk at the British Museum; a two-day conference at the University of London will, among other things, examine his legacy in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
I consulted two dictionaries of quotations, the Oxford and Penguin, to check the most memorable lines of this poet, novelist, essayist, song and short story writer. Not a single entry. They skipped from Tacitus to Hippolyte Taine as if there was nothing in Tagore's collected works (28 thick books, even with his 2,500 songs published separately) that ever had stuck in anyone's mind, or was so pithily expressed that it deserved to; as if what had come out of Tagore's pen was a kind of oriental ectoplasm, floating high above our materialist western heads, and ungraspable. In fact, I could remember one line clearly enough, and vaguely remember a whole stanza. The first is how he described the Taj Mahal: like "a teardrop on the face of eternity". The second is the inscription Wilfred Owen's mother found in her dead son's pocketbook: "When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable." But I owe this knowledge to (a) a tourist guide in Agra, and (b) to a biography. Reading Tagore himself had nothing to do with it.
True, writers can't be ranked merely by their quotability, but Tagore's neglect is extraordinary. No other language group reveres a writer as 250 million Bengali-speakers do Tagore. Shakespeare and Dickens don't come into the picture; the popularity of Burns in Scotland 100 years ago may be his nearest equivalent in Britain. Every Bengali will know some Tagore, even if they can't read or write and the words come from a popular song or the national anthem (those of both India and Bangladesh use his verse). The visitor to Bengal can easily find some comedy in the mass adoration. Years ago, trying to penetrate a layer of Kolkata bureaucracy, I spent hours listening to bureaucrats on the subject of Tagore – "his translations into English are like embroidery seen from the back," one said – while getting nowhere with the unrelated topic I was meant to be investigating. Then again, love of literature can slide into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. When Tagore died in 1941, the huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. At the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes.
It's hard to think of any other writer anywhere who has aroused this level of fervour, but Tagore might still be seen as a purely local phenomenon, a curiosity and irrelevance to the world beyond Bengal. Except that he wasn't. In 1913 he won the Nobel prize for literature, the first non-European to win a Nobel. The story is well known. In 1912 he sailed from India to England with a collection of English translations – the 100 or so poems that became the anthology Gitanjali, or "song offerings". He lost the manuscript on the London tube. Famously, it was found in a left luggage office. Then – decisively – WB Yeats met Tagore, read his poems and became his passionate advocate (while pencilling in suggestions for improvements).
Events moved at breathtaking speed. Tagore had arrived in London in June, he had his anthology published by Macmillan with an introduction by Yeats in the following March, and on 13 November 1913 he was awarded the Nobel. Before he left Kolkata he knew one person in London, the painter William Rothenstein. Two years later he was a global phenomenon. The notion that literary prizes secure reputations and sell books is modern publishing wisdom, but nothing compares with what the Nobel did for Tagore a century ago. Gitanjali found a vast audience in its many editions. In the tremulous months before the first world war, as well as during the war, its spiritual message and reverence for the natural world struck a chord. It contains the lines Owen wrote in his pocketbook, and soon had translations in many other languages, including French, by André Gide, and Russian, by Boris Pasternak.
The success turned everyone's heads, including Tagore's. He became the most prominent embodiment of how the west wanted to see the east – sagelike, mystical, descending from some less developed but perhaps more innocent civilisation; above all, exotic. He looked the part, with his white robes and flowing beard and hair, and sometimes overplayed it. Of course, the truth was more complicated. The Tagores were among Kolkata's most influential families. They'd prospered in their role as middle men to the East India Company, whose servants named them Tagore because it was more easily pronounced than the Bengali title, Thakur. The west wasn't strange to them. Rabindranath's grandfather, Dwarkanath, owned steam tug companies and coal mines, became a favourite of Queen Victoria's and died in England (his tombstone is in Kensal Green cemetery). As for the poet himself, this was his third visit to London. On his first, he'd heard the music hall songs and folk tunes that he later incorporated into his distinctive musical genre, rabindra sangeet.
More than anything, what Tagore stood for was a synthesis of east and west. He admired the European intellect and felt betrayed when Britain's conduct in India let down the ideal. His western enthusiasts, however, saw what they wanted to see. First, he was an exotic fashion and then he was not. "Damn Tagore," wrote Yeats in 1935, blaming the "sentimental rubbish" of his later books for ruining his reputation. "An Indian has written to ask what I think of Rabindrum [sic] Tagore," wrote Philip Larkin to his friend Robert Conquest in 1956. "Feel like sending him a telegram: 'Fuck all. Larkin.'"
Is his poetry any good? The answer for anyone who can't read Bengali must be: don't know. No translation (according to Bengalis) lives up to the job, and at their worst, they can read like In Memoriam notices: "Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark" is among the better lines. Translator William Radice thinks that Tagore's willingness to tackle the big questions, heart on sleeve, has made him vulnerable to "philistinism or contempt". That may be so – see Larkin – but perhaps the time has come for us to forget Tagore was ever a poet, and think of his more intelligible achievements. These are many. He was a fine essayist; an educationist who founded a university; an opponent of the terrorism that then plagued Bengal; a secularist amid religious divisions; an agricultural improver and ecologist; a critical nationalist. In his fiction, he showed an understanding of women – their discontents and dilemmas in a patriarchal society – that was ahead of its time. On his 150th anniversary, we shouldn't resist two cheers, at least.
Ian Jack writes a weekly column for the Guardian and contributes to other sections of the paper. He began his journalistic career in Scotland and later covered South Asia as a foreign correspondent. He edited the Independent on Sunday from 1991 to 1995 and Granta magazine between 1995 and 2007. A second anthology of his reporting and writing is forthcoming next year from Jonathan Cape.
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