Tagore's Gitanjali

Gitanjali (Song Offerings) is a collection of devotional poems by the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. The Bengali original appeared in 1910, and in November 1912 the India Society in London published 103 of the poems in an English prose version by Tagore himself, with an introduction by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. The poems speak to a divine beloved with humility, longing and joy, using images of rivers, harvest, music and death.¹

Tagore, born in Calcutta in 1861 to a leading Bengali family, was a poet, songwriter, painter and educator who founded the school Santiniketan. In 1912 he traveled to England with notebooks of his translations. Yeats, the painter William Rothenstein and others read them and were moved, and Yeats wrote that he carried the manuscript with him on trains and buses and into restaurants. The Nobel Committee awarded Tagore the Prize in Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of the book, the first for a non-European. He was knighted in 1915 and renounced the knighthood in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Tagore also wrote the words and music of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. Some critics later said that his plain English version lost the music of the Bengali.¹²