William Radice’s fine translations of the poems and stories of Tagore have restored to us the work of this great poet (1861-1941) whose native language was Bengali.  His initial fame in England came mainly through Yeats, to whom William Rothenstein had sent Tagore’s own translation of Gitanjali, to which Yeats wrote an enthusiastic Introduction to the volume published in 1920.  Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature, and was awarded a knighthood which he subsequently returned when he became involved in India’s struggle for independence.  He himself was aware that his own translations were inadequate, as have been several others by Indian’s, and not until Dr. Radice’s impeccable and loving translations have we been able to discern Tagore’s stature.  His work is at once rooted in the age-old and still living tradition of India’s mainstream of spiritual civilisation, and, as Dr. Radice is at pains to point out, open to the new vistas of the mind revealed by modern Western science.  Dr. Radice perhaps fails to give due weight to the fullness with which Tagore is at ease in his own world and culture, of which Yeats wrote in his Introduction to Gitanjali:

The work of a supreme culture they [his poems] yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.  A tradition has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion…He is also so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something that has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defence.

If Dr. Radice lays more emphasis on Tagore’s modernity than on his participation in India’s sacred tradition (in which, as Yeats understood, religion and poetry are the same thing) he is, after all, a man of  the modern West and on the side of science and ‘progress’.

From Tagore’s vast output of verse, stories and essays, besides his work in education, his travels and public engagements, Dr. Radice prefers to translate this 120-page collection of three volumes of poems he has chosen to describe as ‘brief’ rather than ‘short’.  Brevity is a virtue in itself, a technical accomplishment.  Although Tagore visited and knew Japan well, his ‘brief’ poems are not at all like haiku.  The forms are variable, from epigrammatic couplets to lyrical celebrations of  nature and of  human beauty.  It so happened that this book reached me in hospital, and in my state of limited attention there could have been no more welcome gift: short poems, in varying moods, but all springing from a vision of delight in the here and now, in the nature of things.  Dr. Radice quotes the German scholar Helene Meyer-Franck who describes the quality of Tagore’s Brief Poems (which she has herself translated):

…the voice of goodness, the voice of God calls, and, what is more,…in everyone, even in the most unregenerate soul, it is as the voice of goodness that this voice is perceived.

Dr. Radice agrees that

amidst the many other qualities of Tagore’s brief poems…a quality of goodness is what shines forth most strongly.  It sets him apart from most other twentieth-century poets; it may be what in years to come readers will most value in him.

Goodness after all is one thing about which Traditionalist and Modernist can agree.

Tagore himself knows the value of ‘goodness’, which in Jottings (198 and 199) he treats with the light touch characteristics of many of his epigrammatic couplets:

and

All these Brief Poems reflect moments in the ordinary flow of life.  Images, themes, vary as attention varies, but the colour, flavour, tone, gives continuity.  One can read one, or a whole page, without a jolt.  We are continuously accompanied by Tagore from living moment to living moment in the simple steps by which we travel through time unmarked by important events.  We find everywhere a sense of familiarity, for human lives are much alike, in great things as well as small; we too have been there in the everyday of life:

or

Two appendices, written by Tagore, are of relevant interest.  The first – an essay on Lekhan (Particles) published in 1928 – describes his discovery of the Rota Print machine.  This gave him the idea of writing poems in handwriting on aluminium sheets and giving them as autographs to his many admirers.  Thus the whole collection came to be later published in the poet’s hand-writing.  Such was the casual nature of the poet’s production of these ‘occasional’ poems that it was only when a friend pointed out that some of her own poems had been accidentally included that Tagore realised that he had not even recognised his own work as such!

The second is an essay first published in 1932 and later by Harriet Monroe in her prestigious journal Poetry Chicago.  It is a forthright rejection of those premises of the twentieth-century ‘modern movement’, including Eliot and Pound and the mainly American influence that relegated what had previously been known as ‘modern’ – the English Romantics – to an unvalued past.  The Romantic delight in metaphor and illusion must give place to objective realism – to ‘fact’:

Today to hurl abuse at the world is regarded as a defence of truth and if it is claimed that in the past poets wrote subjectively, and that the ultra-modern poets do not select I disagree.  They select too.  To choose a fresh flower is selection, and to choose a dried-up, worm-eaten flower is selection as well.  The only difference is that the modernists are forever scared that someone might slander them by saying they have a penchant for selection.  There are Tantrics who deliberately eat or handle disgusting things, in case anyone should think they are partial to pleasant things.  The result is they become thoroughly partial to unpleasant things. If  in poetry this kind of Tantric practice becomes normal, then where will those who have a natural taste for wholesome things go?  Worms attack certain varieties of tree or flower or leaf, and ignore many others.  Should one give priority to the former and boast that this is realism?

Again

…the modernity of poets in the West is difficult to grasp.  It is murky.  Their outlook jolts and shoves the reader.  The world they are seeing and showing is ramshackle, rubbish-strewn, dust-blown.  They cannot disengage themselves, in a pure manner, from the mundane world.  The roar with laughter at the wood and straw of a broken idol; they say its real character has been exposed.  These brickbats, this jabbing at wood and straw with barbed comments, they regard as a strong assertion of actual truth.

Tagore has written more rapturously than any other poet (it could possibly be said, though I think also of St-John Perse, and his sense of the marvels of creation), of the delight of being in a world so full of wonders and beauty, especially of his native Bengal – adding indeed that he counts himself fortunate that he was not born in the West.  I have found the same simple delight and wonder in these ‘brief’ poems as in Gitanjali or in his dramatic masterpiece The Post Office, also translated by William Radice.