Tagore

For a while now, I’ve wanted to write something about my love youthful love affair with Tagore’s poetry.  It is not something that I’ve outgrown, but other voices have also entered my life, and Tagore is now one among many.

     

It is fashionable these days to dismiss Tagore’s poetry as “dated” or simply “quaint.”  His importance to the poets of the Latin American “boom” generation is often met with incredulity.  Part of the problem has always been that we in the West know Tagore only through translation; the essential Bengali qualities of his poetry, the musical and linguistic character of the originals, are lost in translation.  And the translations that we have were, for the most part, done almost a century ago.  Despite this, those pale reflections, the free verse English translations penned by Tagore himself and others, remain special to me.

                                                                                              

     As a teenager and young man, I had plenty of (self-imposed) psychological and emotional turmoil in my life, but I could always find refuge and peace at the local university library, where I poured for hours over Gitanjali, The Crescent Moon, Fireflies, The Songs of Kabir, Fruit-Gathering, The Gardener, Stray Birds and The Fugitive.  What was more real, the dark library with its narrow staircases, or the luxuriant tropical gardens, the lonely seashores, the ecstatic dance of the disciple before his Beloved in Tagore's poetry?  I will never forget the joy that those books brought me, the way they entered my dreams.  All of the world’s desires and emotions seemed spread out before me, as well as the persistent call of the world hereafter.  Only a few other poets have spoken to me so powerfully: Neruda, John of the Cross, Cavafy, Novalis.