I Won't Let You Go

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

I WON’T LET YOU GO: SELECTED POEMS

SECOND EXPANDED EDITION TRANSLATED BY

KETAKI KUSHARI DYSON

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(1861-1941) is India’s greatest modern poet and the most brilliant creative genius produced by the Indian Renaissance. As well as poetry, he wrote songs, stories and novels, plays, essays, memoirs and travelogues. He was both a restless innovator and a superb craftsman, and the Bengali language attained great beauty and power in his hands. He
created
his own genre of dance drama and is one of the most important visual artists of modern India. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Tagore’s poetry has an impressive wholeness: a magnificent loving warmth, compassionate humanity, a delicate sensuousness, an intense sense of kinship with nature and a burning awareness of man’s place in the universe. He moves with effortless ease from the literal to the symbolic, from the part of the whole, from a tiny detail to the vast cosmos.

He is religious in the deepest sense, wavering between a faith that sustains the spirit in times of crisis – or fills it with energy and joy in times of happiness – and a profound questioning that can find no enduring answers. To him the earth is a vulnerable mother who clings to all her offspring, saying
‘I won’t let you go’
to the tiniest blade of grass that springs from her womb, but who is powerless to prevent the decay and death of her
children
.

‘Dyson has succeeded in these new translations in restoring a sense to the reader of Tagore’s real and remarkable genius as a poet. Short of learning Bengali one does not see how our sense of him as a poet could be bettered than it is by reading her
versions
… if any translation can put Tagore back on the map where he belongs, this one should do it’

– POETRY REVIEW

Rabindranath Tagore in America in 1916.