I Won't Let You Go (3 page)

Special thanks are due to Dr Purnendu Bikash Sarkar of Gitabitan Archive, Calcutta, for checking and double-checking the dates of composition for the songs in this volume, using all the available sources. This help has been invaluable and is deeply appreciated.

The original Introduction has been left well alone, with one
silent
correction. That correction is in respect of Annapurna Turkhud’s age and is due to the researches of Dr Ghulam Murshid of London, who has proved, by checking the document of Annapurna’s
marriage
to Harold Littledale, that she was three, not six, years older than Rabindranath. One minor change in the wording of a poem had already been done in the 1996 reprinting of this book. The only significant change in the text of a poem in this edition is in the very first poem, ‘The Suicide of a Star’, where the star has changed its gender; the reason for my decision is provided in a new note on the poem. The poem ‘Death-dream’ has an additional note appended to the original note, in response to a view expressed by a critic. The additional poems and songs included in this edition have necessarily generated some additions in the critical apparatus.

When I prepared the first edition of this book, I had access to only four volumes of Prasantakumar Pal’s multi-volume biography of Tagore. Since then five more volumes have seen the light of day. In the light of the new volumes, it has been possible to retrieve the A.D. dates of a few more poems and songs. It has also been
possible
to withdraw question marks after some places of composition. Editors have been ultra-conservative in the past, not accepting, it would seem, either the place or the date of composition of a piece unless explicitly given in Tagore’s own hand on the manuscript. But where extensive biographical researches by scholars like Pal have helped to eliminate previous doubts, I have accepted their
conclusions and withdrawn interrogation marks.

Another small point needs to be clarified. The printed volumes of Tagore’s poetry tend to indicate Bolpur or Santiniketan beneath a piece in a somewhat indifferent manner. For poems written in the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century the name Bolpur is usually used. In a later period we notice that ‘Bolpur’ is being definitively replaced by ‘Santiniketan’. Tagore’s father had actually acquired the land near Bolpur in the early 1860s, and a legal document registering that acquisition indicates that already by March 1863 he had built a small house there, naming it Santiniketan (‘the abode of peace’).
4
A house, and some land around it: that is how the new place began. In spite of founding his school there in 1901, Tagore, in his manuscripts and letters, continued for many years to refer to the place simply as Bolpur.

In those days Santiniketan was naturally seen as an extension of Bolpur. For the most part, the nomenclature does not really matter, but because of the larger number of pieces from
Gitanjali
included in the present edition, the oscillation between the two names within the same collection became uncomfortable to my editorial eye. Bolpur, of course, is still the railway station where we get off to visit Santiniketan, and most of us take a cycle-rickshaw to continue the journey. It is just three kilometres or roughly a couple of miles from the station to the campus post office. But Bolpur has now become a bustling country town, with its own complex, inevitably ambiguous, set of attitudes towards its near neighbour. On the one hand, it is interested in making the most of the influx of tourists and all those who pass through it, and is conscious of its strategic position as the point of entry for those who arrive by rail for proceeding to Santiniketan. On the other hand, it is now proud of its own civic identity and does not wish to be regarded as a mere annexe to its internationally famous neighbour. It is embedded in local and regional politics, whereas Visvabharati is a university under the charge of the Central
Government
. There are inevitably frictions and tensions. Given these minutiae of the contemporary scenario, I did not wish to confuse readers by letting them imagine that while writing some of the
Gitanjali
poems in this locale, Tagore was somehow commuting between two adjoining spots in a random manner. Pal in his
narrative
mode in his biographical tomes leans to the name ‘
Santiniketan
’, though in some lists that he provides, following manuscript sources, ‘Bolpur’ is also used. Unable to resolve this anomaly in any other way, I have, in the context of
Gitanjali
, adopted a
commonsense
solution: for all the pieces from this collection written in this particular location I have hyphenated the two names, calling the place ‘Bolpur-Santiniketan’. I have noticed that Pal does
occasionally
refer to the location exactly in this hyphenated way in the first volume of his biography.
5

When working on the first edition, I had to consult the first and second volumes of Pal’s biography of Tagore in their first editions, published by Bhurjapatra. The first volume of the book in my personal collection is still the Bhurjapatra edition. In 1989 when I was working in Santiniketan, the second volume had already become unavailable in the market, so all consultation had to be in the library, or perhaps someone, perhaps Pal himself, kindly lent me a copy – I have forgotten the exact circumstance. All nine volumes of the book are now published by Ananda, and the second volume in my possession is also the Ananda edition, bought on a
subsequent
visit. As a result, when compiling new notes for this
edition
, I have had no option but to consult the second volume in its second edition, though the older references to the same volume remained to the Bhurjapatra edition. I felt uncomfortable about this, as the pagination seems to have changed significantly between those two editions, so I tried to chase the references in order to provide additional references to the second volume in its second edition. I have tried my best in this respect, and apologise if by chance I have missed any instance where the reference to Pal’s second volume is solely to its first edition.

Remembering all those who welcomed the first edition of this book and thinking also of all those who feel strongly that we should continue to widen Tagore’s readership, let me make one
concluding
point. It takes time to educate a new reading public about a poet from a different linguistic-literary tradition, especially in a period when poetry, though continuing to be extremely important to those who write it, does not seem to be a fast-flowing current of mainstream cultural activity in many societies, and does not occupy a central place in education (as it certainly did in my youth). To win new readers for a poet when they do not know that poet’s original language, the translations must of course have the pulse of poetry to attract them in the first place, but in the end
reception
is always a two-way process. Different languages give us
different
ways of relating to the world. In culture as in nature, it is in cherishing diversity that hopes for a healthy evolution lie, and not in any globalised monoculture that flippantly refuses to see any value in what others value. Readers of translated poetry must
themselves be prepared to do some homework. They have to be curious about how others view and classify the world. They need to learn to tolerate the different, adjusting to slightly different angles of vision, and extend a courteous welcome to the unexpected.

When we Bengalis discovered the English poets in the
nineteenth
century, we eagerly claimed them as part of our common human heritage. Likewise in the twentieth century we claimed several poets from other European languages. Without a vibrant wish to know and greet others, and claim them as part of our extended family, a true expansion of our mental horizons cannot take place. Within India, there needs to be more learning of each other’s languages and more direct translation between the country’s many languages, without relying on a link language.

As I turn the pages of Tagore’s works, I really wish I could have translated even more poems and songs – I see dozens and dozens of pieces I would have loved to translate – but life is short, and art is long, and a book of translated poetry has to be of a certain size to be vendible in a given market. If the right opportunity comes my way, maybe I shall translate some more Tagore pieces another time – who knows! – but I have no doubt that if humankind and poetry survive, many more poems and songs from Tagore’s oceanic corpus will be translated in the years to come, and not just into English, but into many other languages of this wide world.

This translation project was initiated by Visvabharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. I would like to thank
Nemaisadhan
Bose for having invited me to undertake this project
during
his vice-chancellorship of Visvabharati. A translation bursary from Southern Arts enabled me to begin the work in England; a Visiting Professorship attached to Rabindra Bhavana,
Visvabharati
, allowed me to concentrate on the work in Santiniketan for a period of three months; and a grant from the British Council enabled me to travel to India. It was a pleasure to be attached to Rabindra Bhavana not only because of the cooperation I received from the entire staff while I was working there, but also because everyone made me feel completely at home: I was like a member of a family. I would like to give my warmest thanks to
Satyendranath
Roy, Dwijadas Bandyopadhyay, Sanatkumar Bagchi, Supriya Ray, Indrani Das, Ashis Hajra, Nandakishor Mukhopadhyay, Sadhana Majumdar, Sushobhan Adhikary, Shubhra Shil, Prasantakumar Pal, and Deviprasanna Chattopadhyay. Indrani Das gave a great deal of her time to help me to select suitable photographs for this book from Rabindra Bhavana’s archival collection of photographs. I am grateful to Prasantakumar Bhanja and Indranil Bhattacharya of the Music Department for explaining certain musical terms to me; to Kashinath Bhattacharya, Ashiskumar Gupta, Pijushkanti Dan, and Badal Dutta of the Botany Department for preparing a list of
relevant
botanical names; and to Sankha Ghosh, Professor-Director of Rabindra Bhavana for a period until his return to Jadavpur
University
, and Amlan Datta, a former Vice-Chancellor of
Visvabharati
, for checking certain points and answering certain queries. Thanks are due to friends at other departments of Visvabharati who were encouraging and supportive, to Robert Sykes, formerly at the British Council, Calcutta, for his cooperation, and to Ashoke Sen of Calcutta for lending me various relevant publications.

As always, I am indebted to my husband Robert for “topping up” in every kind of support in the final months given to the preparation of this manuscript. I would like to thank Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books on behalf of both myself and Visvabharati for the decision to publish this volume.

[1991]