I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Tagore with Rani Mahalanobis (to his right), daughter-in-law Pratima Devi (to Rani’s right), and others in Italy, 1926.

  Other factors entered into the decline of Tagore’s reputation in the English-speaking world. Changing fashions in the Anglo-American literary scene, Tagore’s repudiation of the knighthood after the Amritsar massacre, his open condemnation of the cult of nationalism, his popularity in inter-war Germany: all took their toll. The English-speaking literary world was rapidly becoming a world dominated by fashions rather than guided by abiding intellectual curiosities. If a reputation fell, it would be quickly trodden over in the pursuit for the next craze. It was not fashionable to delve deeply to find out what might have gone wrong. English translations of selections of his poems were done from time to time by Bengalis, usually for the Indian market outside Bengal, but occasionally for publication outside India as well, but these did not help to put Tagore back on the map. Looking at the phenomenon from a historical perspective, it would be correct to say that the root cause of the decline was the fact that there was no one in the English-speaking world competent enough to translate this great poet from the original language. The days of the Empire did not favour the emergence of such individuals.

  When the British were still establishing themselves in India under the aegis of the East India Company in the latter half of the eighteenth century, they were marked by a relative lack of arrogance. Intellectually they were shaped primarily by the Enlightenment, which meant that they were curious about India’s social, political, and religious institutions. This attitude was reinforced by their own expatriate social lives, their enjoyment of spiced dishes, hookah-smoking, nautches, Urdu ghazals, and Indian mistresses. The great surge of British Orientalist researches relating to India took place in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Its landmarks were the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784, the regular publications of which, the Asiatick Researches, were widely read in Europe and ushered in a new era of scholarship, the first English translations of classic Sanskrit texts, and the foundation of the College of Fort William in Calcutta in 1800 for the training of British civil servants who would be acculturated to India and fluent in Indian languages.9

  But as the British gained political confidence in India, these positive attitudes were gradually replaced by attitudes which were negative towards India and therefore less favourable to Indian studies. Waves of Christian fundamentalism in the shape of the Evangelical revival and of secular radicalism in the form of Utilitarianism gathered strength in Britain and hit India. To men moulded by such movements at home the Company’s Indian territories seemed a stage ready for action. The Evangelicals wanted India to be opened up for missionary enterprise; the Utilitarians wanted to see India westernised by means of effective legislation and strong centralised administration; other radicals wanted India changed by means of English education. One of the most powerful of the anglicisers was T.B. Macaulay, whose 1835 minute on education, notorious in Indian history, swept aside the modern Indian languages as rude dialects and all Oriental literature as intrinsically inferior to Western literature, maintaining that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, that ‘all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’. He proposed that a class of anglicised Indians should be trained to be interpreters between the British and the Indian masses, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.10 This new climate of ideas encouraged the Indian elite to acquire English to the best of their abilities and discouraged the British from learning Indian languages in any depth. It was the British understanding of the modern Indian languages that suffered most from this change. The foundations for the study of ancient India had already been laid, and in 1837 James Prinsep deciphered the rock edicts of the emperor Ashoka, the key to the rediscovery of Buddhist India. A few British scholars would continue to study Sanskrit and Pali, but the modern languages of India, in which exciting new developments were beginning to take place, which were becoming the space in which the Indian Renaissance was taking shape, were neglected. This re-awakening happened because the Indian elite welcomed the new influences without throwing their own traditions overboard. They managed to create a space for themselves in which they could express themselves, experiment with new things and still be themselves. The British could not take this space away from them or interfere with it.

  No wonder, then, that no literary personality emerged in either Britain or in the British community of imperial India who could tackle the translation of Tagore’s poetry, despite the very long commercial and political connection between the two countries. Britain’s cultural attitude rubbed itself onto the rest of the Empire and the English-speaking world. A competent translator could have hardly emerged in Canada or the USA when Britain, with all her ties with India, could not produce such a person.

  Generally speaking, this legacy of the Empire is still the prevailing situation in the cultural interchanges between the English-speaking world and the world of the modern South Asian languages. If translations from the latter have to be done, it is the Asians themselves who have to do it. It is they who have to be the mediators and bridge-builders. The English-speaking literati are much more comfortable with those South Asian authors who produce literary works in the English language. It is assumed that these texts require no mediation, and they have been quickly and conveniently appropriated into the new academic category of ‘Commonwealth Literature’, bypassing the bulk of modern literature in the subcontinent, which continues to be written in the South Asian languages and is invisible in the English-speaking world. A new leviathan called ‘Third World Literature’ is also beginning to appear in discussions, and certain authors of Indian origin who write only in English are being co-opted by the West as representatives of the Indian segment of this mammoth category. Do anything, in short, except face the challenge, the intellectual effort, of acquiring new tongues and penetrating new universes! This latest tendency to co-opt certain authors who write in English to represent Indian literature is essentially a form of cultural neo-colonialism, a continuation of Macaulay’s old reliance on ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.

  However, at long last, there are some signs of change. The first serious literary translator from Bengali to emerge in Britain is William Radice, whose translations of selected poems from Tagore appeared in 1985, and of his stories in 1991, both from Penguin. (Before him, E.J. Thompson, an Englishman who was a contemporary of Tagore, had learned some Bengali and written about Tagore, and done some translations also; Radice attempts an analysis of Thompson’s achievements and limitations in the preface to his own book of translations of the poems.) I am aware that translators from Bengali have emerged in the USA and Australia. Continental Europeans are also realising that they must translate directly from the Indian languages and not just re-translate from English translations.

  These translations have therefore been undertaken in the belief that Tagore’s poetry (as indeed his other work) deserves to be rescued from the morass of misadventures and cultural politics in which it became bogged down, and looked at with fresh eyes, without any negative pre-judgments derived from colonial times. My aim has been to put together a substantial selection which can give readers an idea of the quality of his poetry, showing them what a varied and exciting poet he is, how relevant to our times, and where there may be sufficient “inter-resonance” between the poems to produce a cumulative effect, conveying something of his total personality, his recurrent and obsessive images, and something, too, of his craftsmanship.

  Tagore writing, Santiniketan.

  This could not be done by means
of academic decisions on what would be a “representative” selection. It was more appropriate to let my creative, artistic decisions as a translator determine the choice. In other words, I would go through the corpus, turn the pages, look at a poem, and ask myself: ‘Would this come out well in English? Can I do it? Is there a chemistry, a match, between this poem and my capabilities as a translator?’ So the poems have chosen me as much as I have chosen them. And my file of translations has grown. It was not possible to include something from every book of poems published by Tagore, but I hope that the poems chosen for this selection will give the reader some idea of the range and depth of his poetry. The translations follow the texts and arrangement of the West Bengal Government’s Tagore

  Centenary edition of Tagore’s collected works (1961). I also consulted the earlier Visvabharati edition of the collected works on many occasions, whenever I had any doubts about the interpretation of a particular line or phrase or about any punctuation, and especially for compiling the notes, but nowhere have I noticed any significant discrepancies. The books from which the poems are taken are arranged chronologically, as in the collected works; even when two books have been published in the same year, we know which comes first because the month of publication is known. The sequence of poems from a particular book corresponds to Tagore’s own intentions.

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

  A note on one of the translations may be of interest to readers. During my student days at Oxford in the early sixties, friends sometimes urged me to translate Tagore. Looking back, I think their curiosity might have been provoked by media references to the centenary of his birth in 1961. I did translate a few things, one of which, through the assiduity of an enterprising friend, eventually found its way to the Dublin magazine Poetry Ireland, where it saw the light of day in 1964. ‘The Victorious Woman’, included in this anthology, is a revised version of that early effort. Richly descriptive and sonorous, it had been an ambitious choice for those days. I am sure I had been unconsciously goaded to show off the pedigree of my native tongue, for two of the most irksome questions that I was frequently asked were: first, whether, seeing that I was studying English literature and spoke English with reasonable fluency, I had not really always spoken English at home in my childhood, and secondly, whether Bengali could as yet be called a language, properly speaking, or was it not still in the stage of a dialect. (Dialects had not acquired class in those days. And Macaulay’s ghost was tenacious.)

  I have also ventured to include some songs, all taken from Gitabitan, the standard collection of Tagore’s songs, which is also included in the collected works. The songs have been arranged chronologically, following the chronology given in a standard work of reference,11 which has been kindly re-checked by Professor Sankha Ghosh. Some of the songs also occur in other books, verse-collections or plays. Such information will be found at the end of each song. Thus those who may wonder why I have not translated anything from the famous Gitanjali will find their answer in the section of songs: two songs from the Bengali Gitanjali (1910) have in fact been translated. Songs have also come, via Gitabitan, from Gitimalya (1914) and Gitali (1914). But I must emphasise that Tagore’s songs have very strong independent lives as songs. That is how most Bengalis approach Gitabitan – as an anthology in its own right, in which each piece happens to be a song. All the songs have therefore been translated from Gitabitan, as individual songs and discrete pieces. Each song has been treated as a text in its own right.

  I am aware of the opinion expressed by Radice in his Selected Poems of Tagore that songs cannot be translated. In so far as this means the obvious, that a song is made up of its words and its melody, and the melody cannot be translated, one necessarily agrees, but granting that the translation of all poetic material is a difficult and delicate task, the translation of the lyric of a song is no more difficult than that of a poem which has not been set to music. Indeed, because of its structure, the lyric of a song may be much easier to translate than a complex poem. A rigid division between poems and songs cannot be maintained, certainly not in the Indian context, where a considerable overlap between the two modalities has traditionally been taken for granted by artists as well as audiences. The bhajans of Mirabai are both poems and songs. The Baishnab lyrics from the “medieval” period of Bengali literature are both poems and songs. It is clear from Tagore’s own use of words that he often thought of the roles of the poet and the singer/songmaker as interchangeable, and surely this is true of many other cultures as well, much of folk poetry being also folk song, and vice versa.

  I have always been attracted to songs in different languages, and I believe that like poems, they can be marvellous introductions to a new language and genuine aids to language-learning, making it a pleasurable experience, a fact which does not seem to be much appreciated by modern language teachers in British schools. Being simple-structured poems, songs exhibit the “works” of the language like a device in a crystal jar. I remember the pleasure I used to get as a young girl from the 78 r.p.m. records of French songs my father used to borrow from the Alliance Française de Calcutta, and in later life I learned to follow Spanish by comparing the Spanish texts of songs with their English translations on the sleeves of records. Indian children who are not born to Hindi or Urdu learn them from Bombay film songs, and all over the world youngsters today pick up lines of English from pop songs. I have also enjoyed translating songs from other languages into Bengali, for instance, Shakespeare’s ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ and the folk songs of the Judaeo-Spanish Ladino tradition, and the results have been appreciated. These experiences have given me the confidence to attempt the translation of a few of Tagore’s songs, without which, to my mind, a selection such as this would not be complete, because it is through his songs that Tagore speaks, as a poet, to his widest audience in Bengali, and no Bengali party is really ever complete until some Tagore songs have been sung. I have kept the songs together in one section so that readers do not forget that the originals do have melodies and are meant to be sung, but I hope my renderings have also captured something of their swing and lilt.

  Capturing the form and the content together when one is trying to translate poetry into poetry (and not into prose) is admittedly the hardest task. By allowing my selection to proceed along the free-flowing route outlined above, I have spared myself unnecessary struggles with structures that refuse reincarnation. Some poems are simply untranslatable. There is no need to wrestle with these when one is trying to introduce the poet to a new audience, because there is a whole range of excellent poems which can, with a little sensitive effort, be given an English form. Given the structure of a poem in the original language, the aim is to create a parallel or corresponding poetic structure in the language into which one is translating, using the various sonic devices available in the latter. The two structures will not be ‘equal in all respects’ like the congruent triangles we cut out of paper in school geometry lessons, but there should be a certain resemblance or correspondence between the two. It is an act of approximation, a dance of interpretation, making good use of the area of overlap between the two languages in meanings, sounds, moods, suggestions, and so forth. A good rule of thumb in practice is to adjust to the natural rhythm and cadence of the language into which one is translating by means of many micro-decisions, while stretching the capacity of that language by allowing it to mirror slightly alien patterns of thought. The meandering free verse or prose poetry of Tagore’s later years is naturally fun to recreate, but I have also attempted a fair number of poems with much tighter structures. The language of Tagore’s poetry is exceptionally rich and musical; I hope I have succeeded in conveying something of these qualities in the translations.

  A fact of which readers should be aware is that Bengali does not distinguish between masculine and feminine forms in its third person pronouns, between he and she, between him and her, between his and her. Naturally, most of the time the context tells us quite unambiguo
usly how to interpret the signs, but sometimes no such help is available. Nor does Bengali have gender-markers in verbs, as some other Indian languages do. In Tagore’s lyric poetry and songs one encounters certain instances of gender-ambiguity which make one suspect that he has in fact used the “unisex” third person pronoun in a deliberate manner to create an atmosphere of refined poetic ambiguity. It is as if he is asking us to forget the he and she and to concentrate on the essence of the human situation. It is a great pity that this androgyny, which contributes substantially to the subtlety of the original pieces in which it occurs, cannot be captured in translation. A translator has no option but to reach out for either a he or a she. I have tried to do my best, using my instincts as a Bengali and looking carefully for cultural clues in the inner landscape of each text. But what this means in effect is tuning oneself to respond to certain conventional cues, ignoring the rich possibilities of an unconventional interpretation. And as soon as a choice is made, which can sometimes be alarmingly automatic (so powerful is the hold of gender-stereotypes on our minds), the possibility of the alternative interpretation is blocked and the androgynous power of the original inevitably destroyed. This is an intractable problem. No matter how carefully we proceed, taking all kinds of other factors into account, such as connections a particular text may have with other texts, the fact remains that an ambiguity within a particular text is still an ambiguity within that particular text. It is embedded there, was perhaps consciously put there by the poet, and is an integral part of the poetic gestalt of that text. A poetic ambiguity destroyed is a poetic ambiguity destroyed, and there is really no way in which one can compensate for it. Perhaps some readers will enjoy the intellectual exercise of spotting for themselves the pieces where this specific form of ambiguity occurs in the originals.