I Won't Let You Go (2 page)

As I sit down to write a preface to this new edition of work first undertaken twenty years ago, I am thinking of Professor
Nemaisadhan
Bose, at that time the Vice-Chancellor of Visvabharati, who had persuaded me to undertake the project. He is no longer with us. How he would have loved to hear that this book was receiving a new, enlarged edition! When he had first asked me to translate a selection of Tagore’s poems into English, I had accepted the task more as a challenge than anything else, and not without a degree of trepidation. In the end doing the work proved to be a rewarding and absorbing experience. To select poems for translation I had to immerse myself in Tagore’s poetic corpus for an extended period, and such sustained immersion in the work of a great poet is always a reward in itself. The process of transferring the poetry to the English language was both a pleasurable re-creative activity and an educative experience.

My remit, as I understood it, was to take Tagore’s poetry to those who could not access him in the original language, but could read him in English, and make them see that he was a great poet. Over the years so many – both Westerners and non-Bengali-speaking Indians – have thanked me for revealing to them Tagore’s
greatness
as a poet that going by such feedback, a measure of success may indeed be claimed for the translation project envisioned and initiated by the late Professor Nemaisadhan Bose. Personally for me, it has led to further important work in Tagore studies and also in literary translation. I have also received invitations to
seminars
, conferences, and workshops, and requests to write on
translation
issues and review works of translation. Besides many such articles in Bengali and English scattered in magazines, I have also prefixed prefaces to two other subsequent works of translation, explaining the rationale of my work methods.

In the 1950s the work of the great Bengali poet-translators of the post-Tagore era impacted on my generation. They were my inspiration in my first serious work of poetry translation, done in the mid-sixties, when I translated examples of Anglo-Saxon poetry into alliterative Bengali half-lines. The first fruits of those efforts were published with a preface in
Visvabharati Patrika
in 1971, and years later a little anthology of eleven pieces was published (
Anglo-Saxon
Kabita
, Navana, Calcutta, 1987). My thinking on
translation
issues has developed from those beginnings. Those who are
interested to gain a quick overview of the conceptual framework within which I currently translate may look up a short article in English available on the Internet, based on a presentation I made at a conference at the University of Hyderabad in January 2009.
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The Tagore translation project has indeed been fruitful in my
overall
literary life, generating opportunities for new work.

I would like to say a few words on the new translations
incorporated
in the present edition. The two poems from
Nabajatak
(1940) were published in a special issue of the
Visva-bharati Quarterly
commemorating Tagore’s fiftieth death anniversary
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and were
translated
at the request of Professor Shyamal Kumar Sarkar, who was the journal’s editor at that time. The poem ‘The Year 1400’ from
Chitra
(1896) was translated for an event to celebrate the advent of the year 1400 according to the Bengali calendar. This event, jointly organised in 1993 by the Nehru Centre of the High
Commission
of India in London and the Tagore Centre of London, was held in the premises of the Nehru Centre, and I read out the poem on that occasion. It was subsequently published in the web magazine
Parabaas
(www.parabaas.com). The dramatic poem ‘
Dialogue
between Karna and Kunti’, from the collection
Kahini
(1900), was translated in the spring of 2000 at the request of Bithika Raha of London, who choreographed a dance performance to accompany the words. It was later published in the above-mentioned web magazine
Parabaas
. The background of this poem is elucidated in the Notes section.

The three poems from
Gitanjali
(1910) included in the poems section of this edition have been done specially for this edition. One Bengali critic had lamented the absence of any patriotic song in the first edition of this book, and I have always wished to make amends. Rummaging for suitable samples of patriotic sentiment in Tagore’s word-hoard, I felt that I could do no better than
translate
three highly regarded poems from the Bengali
Gitanjali
, nos. 106, 107, and 108, but decided that they had to be presented as poems rather than as songs. Let me explain why.

No. 106 was set to music by Tagore, but only the first, second, and final stanzas were admitted to the ‘Swadesh’ or patriotic
section
of the definitive collection of his songs, the
Gitabitan
, and I did not wish to present this great poem in a truncated form. No. 108 was never set to music by Tagore himself, but another
musician
, with Tagore’s permission, set it to music and recorded it. In that incarnation the song is familiar enough to Bengalis, and in my growing years I have heard it too, broadcast over the radioz,
but this lyric has never been included in the
Gitabitan
and is not technically a ‘Tagore song’, which is defined as a piece in which both the words and the melody are compositions of Tagore’s. No. 107 is indeed a song and is included in the
Gitabitan
, but in the section marked as ‘Puja’ or ‘worship’, not under the banner of patriotism. This cluster of poems written in the first week of July 1910 may be regarded as companion pieces revealing some of the deepest layers of Tagore’s thinking about his homeland. First he elaborates and praises what he regards as his country’s greatest strength and most precious heritage: its embodiment of
multiracial
, multicultural unity-in-diversity, offering a paradigm for the future development of all humanity.

No. 106 of
Gitanjali
contains, in a highly rhetorical and
embellished
form, that message of universal humanism – patriotic pride transcending itself and becoming an expression of transnational humanistic aspiration – that many international scholars of Tagore are now eager to claim and emphasise as one of the noblest
intellectual
heritages that Tagore has left behind for posterity. As we know, some years later, with the First World War revealing its horrors, Tagore would move away quite decisively from the
European
model of the nation-state, based on competition, aggression, and self-aggrandisement. He would reject everything that was
divisive
. Even in this mainly celebratory poem, no. 106 of
Gitanjali
, the perils of social division are not forgotten. The poem is followed by a searing acknowledgement of his country’s caste-divided
socioeconomic
structure, with its large underclass (no. 107), and a dire warning about the future if this state of affairs is not rectified (no. 108). Though a song-structure is plain in each poem, especially in an emphatic use of the refrain, these poems are not really in the same category as the more tender, God-yearning songs of
Gitanjali
which are clearly wrung from his personal bereavements, but are more in the nature of radical social discourses challenging
orthodoxies
. No. 107 resonates with no. 119 (not translated here), in which God is located where the manual workers are, labouring in the fields, digging roads, come sun, come rain.

We have to remember that these poems were written long before Gandhi started his struggle for the outcastes, calling them ‘Harijans’ (‘God’s people’). When Tagore was writing these poems, Gandhi was still in South Africa. It is in the modality of social discourse that such poems have been formative influences on the
consciousness
of Bengalis growing up in the twentieth century. They have acted as seminal texts, showing the poet-songmaker, the patriot,
and the angry prophet combined in the most creative way. Together with other works in his corpus, such as his drama
Chandalika
(1933), re-shaped as a dance-drama in 1938, emphatically rejecting
untouchability
and proclaiming the common humanity of all classes of society, such texts have left permanent marks on the intellectual and political life of Bengalis.

I should also mention here that in its theme and imagery no. 106 of
Gitanjali
bears a striking resemblance to a song written a year or so later and sung at the annual session of the Indian National Congress held in Calcutta over 26-28 December 1911. That song, ‘Janaganamana-adhinayaka’, sung in chorus on 27 December, the second day of the Congress session, was eventually selected to become independent India’s national anthem.

This is an appropriate moment to remember Prasantakumar Pal, the biographer of Tagore, whose death in 2007 is a sad loss in the field of Tagore scholarship. We are indebted to him for the massive amount of documentary material that he gathered and brought to bear on Tagore’s life, bringing the story of that life up to 1925-26 in nine densely packed, encyclopedic volumes. Pal connects the genesis of the three
Gitanjali
poems I have been discussing, nos. 106, 107, and 108, with a discussion Tagore had conducted, by means of correspondence, with an American lawyer interested in and sympathetic to India, named Myron H. Phelps. Trying to explain to Phelps the origins of the caste system, Tagore said that it had evolved in India through the process of history, in an attempt to accommodate the many different races that had met on Indian soil. Unlike the white races who had decimated the indigenous populations of America and Australia in order to establish their hegemony, the Aryans who came to India arranged society in a hierarchical order, according to colour and occupation. Later arrivals from other geographical regions of the world were absorbed and incorporated in the same way.

Tagore called this ordering a ‘mechanical arrangement and
juxtaposition
, not cohesion and amalgamation’, and commented that ‘unfortunately, the principle[,] once accepted[,] grows deeper and deeper into the constitution of the race even after the stress of the original necessity ceases to exist’. He believed that acceptance of this arrangement had accustomed Indians ‘for centuries not only to submit to every form of domination, but sometimes actually to venerate the power’ that held them down. The foreign rule that then prevailed in India was the political consequence of the
country’s
social malady, but it nevertheless had its positive side as a
historical event, in that it had initiated a process of rejuvenation. ‘The vivifying warmth from outside is gradually making us
conscious
of our own vitality and the newly awakened life is making its way slowly, but surely, even through the barriers of caste. […] If at this stage vital help has come from the West even in the guise of an alien rule, India must submit – nay welcome it, for above all she must achieve her life’s work.’ And what was that ‘life’s work’? He passionately believed that it was India’s destiny ‘that East and West should find their meeting place in her ever hospitable bosom’. No. 106 of
Gitanjali
is the poetic articulation of this credo.
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After the end of the First World War, Visvabharati was founded to
embody
this noble dream.

The section of song-lyrics in this edition has been significantly expanded, with seventeen new songs, fifteen of which have been raided from the larder of
Gitanjali
. There were only two songs from this collection in the previous edition, and I had felt for some time that the collection had been under-represented. I am delighted that I have now been able to rectify that shortcoming.

Several years back I had begun a sheaf of draft translations from
Gitanjali
, but having then put them aside in favour of some other writing commitment, had managed to forget about them completely. Finding the papers accidentally in a folder was like discovering a partially drawn map which presented me with a new challenge: the cartography cried out to be completed. I was spurred to finalise the drafts and soon came under the spell of the simple but
mind-altering
pieces, lyrics which could be described as psychedelic in the best, most positive sense. These inner dialogues between the poet’s ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ are so compelling that they give us an insight into the nature of faith and the way it helps some people to survive the most gruelling ordeals. Overall, they are in the
bhakti
tradition, but within a more universal, more humanistic, Baul-influenced
paradigm
, not affiliated to any particular deity or mythology. They do not lean on any names like Krishna or Shiva, and in them faith and doubt, hope and sadness are in a continuous state of flux, ebbing and flowing in total psychological honesty.

They also gave me an insight into the manner in which such writings often crystallise into ‘sacred texts’ in human traditions. In the first place, the poet tries to put his fingers on an elusive
dimension
of human existence which is difficult to intellectualise, but contact with which is nevertheless intermittently (and deeply) felt. In leaving us delicately chiselled memoirs of those efforts and experiences, the poet creates cultural artefacts, touching which in
turn mimics for us the original quest: we as readers can then hold on to such texts and cherish them as precious inscribed tablets. The beauty of Tagore’s spiritual songs is that they are deeply moving, but not dogmatic. No one clutching them to his heart is likely to violate himself or others as a result of that attachment. Some of the songs are rich in humour and laughter as well.

The addition of several new songs from
Gitanjali
has meant a slight adjustment in the sequencing of the songs. The original ordering had been chronological. The present ordering is still mainly so, except that all the seventeen songs from
Gitanjali
, written over a four-year span, have been kept together for convenience and presented in the order intended by the poet, after which the
chronological
ordering of the remaining songs is resumed.