Ever since Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel in 1913 his international reputation has been both secure and problematic.  Most acknowledge him as a leading lights in 20^th century world literature, but for widely different reasons.  There have always been two broad groups among his admirers: those who revere him as poet-guru (‘Gurudev’ is the appellation he is addressed by in his homeland): and those admiring him as a writer who is great despite his limitations.  The former group has been better served by translators, not least Tagore himself in his own English versions, if only because its members lack critical discernment and are satisfied with vague, ‘spiritual’ language.  For those who care for literature in itself, the crucial task in international Tagore studies is the preparation and presentation of quality translations.

Recently there has been a minor boom in English translations of Tagore, though sadly some of poor quality: The Selected Short Stories of Tagore (Macmillan) translated by Krishna Dutta and Mary Lago,  The Post Office tr Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (St Martin’s Press) and Gitanjali by Joe Winter (Anvil) ought to carry a warning: “The contents of this book are likely to offend literary taste”.  The Dutta-Robinson selection from Picador is little better, hardly giving a sense of Tagore’s range of achievement.

On the positive side, we have the productions of William Radice, who at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London University) occupies Britain’s sole university teaching post in Bengali.  He is unquestionably the finest translator of Tagore into English to date!  Ketaki Dyson has given a commendable performance in her Selected Poems of Tagore (Bloodaxe), though her translations are not of uniform quality.  My own translation of the novella, Quarter, has been well received.

Radice’s Selected Poems of Tagore (Penguin), though offering a glimpse of only a fraction of Tagore’s poetic output, shows Western readers that it by no means only falls into the category of New Age literature.  Radice’s Selected Short Stories (Penguin), his best book, gives the Anglophone reader the surest proof of Tagore’s achievement in fiction, Radice’s translation  of The Post Office is the only English version of a Tagore play that won’t appear ridiculous on stage.

Radice’s new book collects all Tagore’s output in whit is commonly regarded as a minor genre.  Like Radice’s other translation works, it carries a long introduction (32 pages), mostly textual history, of interest only to a Bengali scholar.  But towards the end there are large claims that deserve a careful look.  In trying to provide a context for Tagore in literary and intellectual history, Radice argues that he was more modern than most think, for instance in his interest in science which he valued as a source of knowledge about the cosmos and also “because the scientific stance of detachment matched his own poetic ideal”. This detachment marks the epigrammatic “brief poems”.  But Tagore’s modernity is distinct from literary modernism, of which he was dismissive; witness his 1932 essay on modern poetry, appended to the book.  Rejecting modernism’s emphasis on the “confused, dark side for life – with its tensions and conflicts”, he “chose to go…forward to a new reconciliation of religion and rationalism, poetry and science”.

Inspired by Tagore, Radice launches into vatic flight: “Which way do we now want poetry and literature to go?  On with the collapsed romantic confusion and chaos of the 20^th century? Or forward to a new kind of classicism, a sense of order and unity supported by science and the ever-increasing interconnectedness and ‘globalisation’ of our world?  On with forms of artistic expression radically divorced from Nature, or brought into harmony with a growing sense of responsibility for the health and future of the natural world – a sense enriched by science, but also stimulated by shame at science’s misuse?

Several things need pointed out here.  Both Tagore and Radice limit themselves to a lopsided view of modern literature, which is not all about the cares behind a beautiful smile (to use an image from a Tagore essay).  Think of the poetic range of major 20^th century figures like Eliot, Auden (note in particular their reconciliation with religion or the latter’s use of science and technology), Yeats, Heaney, Walcott, Rilke, Montale, Paz, Neruda, etc.  Even in 1932, there was more to modernism than he makes out – in Yeats and Rilke, for instance.  What is the “new kind of classicism”?  Eliot made much of classicism, but is he now to be seen as a confused romantic?  And if 20^th century writing is romantic how come its forms are “divorced from Nature” – isn’t the romantic associated with fealty to Nature?  The order of science and “globalisation” are fine things, but one mustn’t forget the flip side – new conflicts, ethnic strife, terrorism.  Or, in scientific terminology, entropy.  As Stephen Hawking puts it, “disorder, or entropy, always increases with time”. 

All this, however, does not detract from the pleasure of Tagore’s poetry.  Radice takes the craft of verse seriously and has spent years honing these English versions.  The results are most satisfying when the rhymes come happily.  I find myself tripping along from one such poem to another.  Here, almost randomly, is one from each three sections: