I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems

by Rabindranath Tagore

  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.3 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.

  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.

  1. ‘Translation: the magical bridge between cultures’ [www.parabaas.com/ translation/database/translations/essays/kkd_translation.html]. Interested readers may also look up various book reviews done by me in the same web magazine’s translation section; my ‘Translator’s Prologue’ to my play Night’s Sunlight, translated from the Bengali by myself (Virgilio Libro, Kidlington, Oxon, 2000); my ‘Translator’s Testament’ in my Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2003; and my article ‘Prasanga: Anubad’ in Sahitya Parishat Patrika, vol. 113, nos. 1-2, Baishakh-Ashwin 1413 (October 2006).

  2. The Visva-bharati Quarterly, New Series, Volume 2, Numbers 1-4: May 1991 – April 1992.

  3. Pal, Rabijibani, vol. 6, Ananda Publishers Private Limited, Calcutta, 1993, pp. 48-49. Tagore wrote to Phelps from Santiniketan on 4 January 1909; revised and polished, the letter was published in the August 1910 issue of the Modern Review under the title ‘The Problem of India’.

  4. Pal, Rabijibani, vol. 1, 1st edition (Bhurjapatra, Calcutta, 1982), pp. 50-52.

  5. E.g., Pal, Rabijibani, vol. 1, 1st edition, p. 179.

  [2010]

  Acknowledgements

  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 fo
rmer 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]

  List of Illustrations

  Rabindranath Tagore in America in 1916.

  Rabindranath Tagore in 1875.

  The earliest known photograph of Tagore, developed from a group photograph taken in 1873.

  The house at Jorasanko, Calcutta, where Tagore was born.

  Tagore in Brighton, 1878.

  Tagore with Leonard Elmhirst at Dartington, 1926.

  Tagore in London in 1913 (shortly before the announcement of the Nobel Prize).

  Tagore at the house of William Rothenstein in London, 1912.

  Tagore with Rani Mahalanobis, daughter-in-law Pratima Devi, and others in Italy, 1926.

  Tagore writing, Santiniketan.

  Tagore in January 1940, a year and a half before his death.

  Annapurna Turkhud, teacher of spoken English to the adolescent poet (prior to his first voyage to England) and inspirer of some of his early poems.

  Kadambari Devi.

  Tagore in the leading role of Valmiki in his musical play Valmiki-pratibha, 1881.