The Essential Tagore
The Essential Tagore showcases the talent of India’s Rabindranath Tagore, the basi Asian Nobel Laureate and perhaps the most prolific and diverse severe writer the world has ever known.
Marking the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth, this ambitious collection—the greatest single volume of his work available in English—attempts to represent his extraordinary attainments in ten genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays. In addition to the most recent translations in the innovative idiom, it includes a sampling of works in the first place composed in English, his translations of his own works, three poems omitted from the published version of the English Gitanjali, and examples of his artwork.
Tagore’s writings are noteworthy for their potpourri and innovation. His Sonar Tari signaled a distinctive turn toward the symbolic in Bengali poetry. “The Lord of Life,” from his collection Chitra, produced controversy around his very personal conception of religion. Chokher Bali marked a decisive moment in the history of the Bengali novel because of the way it delved into the minds of men and women. The skits in Vyangakautuk mocked upper-class pretensions. Prose pieces such as “The Problem and the Cure” were lauded by nationalists, who also sang Tagore’s patriotic songs.
Translations for this volume were contributed by Tagore specialists and writers of global stature, including Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, and Sunetra Gupta.
(20110530)
ReviewTagore is one of the greatest literary figures of our time, who commands universal wonderment from native readers of Bengali, but the excellency of whose work is difficult to preserve in translation. In rising to this challenge, the editors and translators of The Essential Tagore have done a magnificent occupation of devising a beauteous volume of selections from Tagore’s tremendous body of writings. The book is also powerfully strengthened by an pleasurable and outstandingly far-reaching foreword by Amit Chaudhuri.
–Amartya Sen (20110916)
There have been a number of attempts, in the century since Yeats made [the] request, to give the English reader a fuller and more precise sense of Rabindranath Tagore–through new translations, anthologies of his work, critical studies, and biographies. But The Essential Tagore, published to coincide with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Tagore’s birth, is the most significant one yet.
–Adam Kirsch (New Yorker )
This new anthology, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, is so welcome, because it starts the procedure of freeing Tagore for a contemporary audience. The primary thing that strikes you regarding The Essential Tagore is the diversity of it is subject’s talents: In a career that stretched over seventy-three years (he finished his basi poem when he was seven, and was composing a story on his deathbed), Tagore wrote novels, plays, literary criticism, political essays on the iniquities of the British Raj, and descriptions of his travels in Persia and Japan. Yet it is to the poems that one turns immediately. The range is dizzying–Tagore composed devotional, patriotic, erotic, and nature verse–and is tackled here by a phalanx of gifted translators, including [Amit] Chaudhuri…[The Essential Tagore] reintroduces a great writer to the world. The most luminous invention in this anthology is not any peculiar poem or essay but the cumulative evocation of the poet’s personality…The experience of living in today’s India–a country that is agrarian, industrializing, and postindustrial, all at once–still forces a multiplicity of viewpoints on the individual, and Tagore ought to have some assert to being the prototypical progressed Indian.
–Aravind Adiga (Bookforum )
As the generously weighty and elegantly devised Essential Tagore from Harvard testifies, Tagore wrote in numerous diverse modes, and rather distinct distinct features of his talent many times come into play.
–Seamus Perry (Times Literary Supplement )
About the AuthorFakrul Alam is Professor of English at the University of Dhaka.
Radha Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at Gargi College, University of Delhi.
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