I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems

by Rabindranath Tagore

  211-13. No. 5 of Patraput: The title of this collection means a plate or a cone-shaped container made from leaves. The Vedic words saying that this earth’s dust is honeyed (stanza 4) are from the Rigveda. The ‘red-dyed feet’ (stanza 5) would have been coloured with a lac dye, used to both adorn the feet and keep the skin from getting chapped. For Bauls (last stanza), see the note on poem no. 13 of Shesh Saptak above. For other items, including the nut tree (stanza 8), see the Glossary.

  214-16. No. 7 of Patraput: Note the word ‘juice’ used three times in stanza 5. In the original it is the important word ras. Its first meaning is ‘juice’, but a technical term of Indian aesthetics has developed from that, connoting aesthetic enjoyment – in a highly refined state, passing into ecstasy or bliss.

  In stanza 6, the phrase ‘ascents and descents’ renders a technical term of Indian music, murchhana.

  The last stanza of the original poem harbours some intriguing poetic ambiguities, which heighten the sense of haze and nocturnal mystery. The trees silhouetted in the night’s light seem to be siblings sitting together as well as their whimsical brushwork. Or is the night’s light also a sibling of the trees, the night landscape being also their joint whimsical composition?

  Lines 15 and 16 of the last stanza could be literally translated as follows: ‘It was as if I had gone off to a neighbouring planet of the earth,/ one can see it through a telescope.’ Line 16 is surprisingly vague and loose in the original. What is the ‘it’ that can be seen through a telescope? Is the poet watching a neighbouring planet from the earth, through a telescope, or physically transported to another planet which is normally only known through a telescope, or watching the earth through a telescope from another planet? Interestingly, what the poet is getting at, that what was quite familiar has suddenly acquired a distance, an unfamiliarity – a common idea in Tagore – remains roughly the same in each case. The way I have translated line 16 seemed the most natural way to say it in English; it blocks the possibility of interpreting it in the second of the three ways mentioned above, but leaves the two other suggestions intact.

  216-17. No. 8 of Patraput: The flower Tagore writes about in this poem has not been definitively identified. It has been suggested that it could be the morning-glory, Ipomoea pulchella, Roth., Convolvulaceae. The name ‘Peyali’ is made up from the word peyala, meaning ‘cup’. See the note on song no. 20 below.

  217-19. No. 11 of Patraput: See the note on ‘The Indifferent One’ (Bithika) above.

  219-20. Dream (Shyamali): The title of this collection, which means ‘she who is dark’, ‘the dark one’ (feminine gender), has a connection with an earthen cottage of that name which Tagore had built for himself in Santiniketan and where he lived for a brief period. The house still exists. The first quotation in this poem, which is repeated in the last stanza, is from a song by the 16th-century Bengali Baishnab poet Jnandas (pronounced Gyandas, with a hard g), in which Radha relates to a female friend a dream-encounter with Krishna. The second quotation is from a song by another Bengali Baishnab poet of the same period, Lochandas, in which Krishna asks a friend the identity of a girl he saw bathing at the ghat and who then went her way, wringing her wet blue sari and his heart with it. The girl was, of course, Radha.

  221. The Lost Mind (Shyamali): The boundary-ridges in stanza 3 refer to earthen ridges built by farmers as boundaries between fields.

  222-24. Tamarind Flower (Shyamali): There seems to be an error in Tagore’s reference to Chitrarath in this poem; see the entry on Chitrarath in the Glossary.

  229-31. A Sudden Encounter (Shyamali): stanza 2, l. 2: see the entry on pomegranate blossoms in the Glossary and the note on song no. 37 below.

  231. No. 5 of Prantik (Marginal): All but three poems of Prantik were written while Tagore was convalescing from a sudden bout of illness. On 10 September 1937, at Santiniketan, he suddenly lost consciousness and remained in a coma for nearly 48 hours. The condition was later diagnosed as erysipelas, the infection being located behind one of his ears. ‘Beneath the stupor of coma, the seemingly suspended consciousness must have been active underground, for the experience of the borderland where he hovered between life and death survived very vividly, and was described by the poet in a series of poems…’ (Kripalani, p. 414).

  231-32. No. 14 of Prantik: This earlier poem was included in Prantik for obvious thematic reasons. I am afraid I have had to add an extra line to this poem in order to accommodate, in the language of poetry, all the ideas packed with extraordinary tightness in the last three lines of the original, so that what was a sonnet has become a fifteen-liner. I tried and tried to do it in 14 lines, but found that to keep to 14 lines either some unit of thought would have to be omitted, or poetry would have to be sacrificed. In the end I decided that the only way to do justice to the original was to add an extra line in translation.

  232. No. 18 of Prantik: This is the last poem of Prantik, showing Tagore’s acute awareness of the conflict that was about to engulf Europe.

  232-37. The Dark Girl and Green Mangoes (Akashpradip, The Sky-Lamp): These may be called twin poems, both charged with the memory of Kadambari Devi. In his memoirs, Jibansmriti (1912), Tagore has recalled the excitement that was generated in his boyish heart by the arrival of a new bride in the family, the first bride to arrive in the Tagore household during his childhood. That young bride was Kadambari Devi. And as he has also reminisced in his later years, he did indeed get a ring from her as a present once, which he lost while bathing in the Ganges at Ghazipur (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 23, Granthaparichay section). The title of the collection refers to the custom of lighting a lamp for the spirits of ancestors and for the gods on the top of a bamboo pole each evening of the month of Kartik.

  237-39. The title Nabajatak, meaning ‘the newborn’, signals that the poet is defiant of approaching death. He still thinks of himself as an entity that is an ongoing project, engaged in constant self-renewal. ‘Bhairab’ and ‘Multan’ in the poem Romantic are names of musical ragas.

  239. For the meaning of the title Sanai (pronounced Shanai), see shanai in the Glossary.

  241-43. The poems of Rogashajyay (On the Sick-bed) and Arogya (Convalescence) were written, or rather composed and then dictated to others, in the shadow of Tagore’s last illness. On 26 September 1940 he suddenly became ill while holidaying in Kalimpong and was brought to Calcutta for treatment on the 29th. After he improved a little, he was brought back to his beloved Santiniketan.

  242-43. No. 9 of Arogya: In this poem theatrical images merge with those of dance and mythology. The compound word used in the original for ‘actors and actresses’ is nata-nati, which can also mean ‘dancers, male and female’. The concepts were fairly interchangeable in India in ancient times, natas and natis being performing artists who were skilled in the four arts of singing, dancing, instrumental music, and acting. What I have translated as ‘the king of the theatre’ in the last line is nataraj, a term which could be glossed as ‘the king of actors/ dancers’ and is an epithet of Shiva as the cosmic dancer, the lord of dance. In the context of the poem the word suggests a supreme theatre-director, choreographer, and ballet-master, a Director-God lonely in his theatre’s deserted greenroom.

  243. No. 28 of Janmadine (On the Birthday, i.e., On My Birthday): Most poems of this collection, including this one, are also from the period of the poet’s last illness, though the collection includes a number of poems from the months preceding it. From his days of river voyages the river is a constant source of imagery in Tagore, but in this poem the very geography of the delta of Bengal, formed by the rivers Ganga and Brahmaputra, and often called nadi-matrik or river-mothered, has been commandeered for the purpose of poetry.

  244. No. 5 of Shesh Lekha (Last Writings): This collection, published posthumously with a foreword by Tagore’s son, gathered in the last poems. Rathindranath has informed us that some of the poems were written down by his father himself; others were dictated and then corrected (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 26, Granthapari
chay section). This particular poem is about an armchair which Tagore had used in Argentina while convalescing there and which Victoria Ocampo had insisted on giving him as a present on his departure from that country. It would not go through the door of the ship’s cabin, so the impetuous Ocampo persuaded the captain to get a workman to remove the door from its hinges so that the chair could be put in. The process had to be repeated to get the chair out. The chair accompanied Tagore to Italy and from there to India and is preserved in the Rabindra Bhavana at Santiniketan. Tagore liked sitting on it in the last days. Tagore and Ocampo exchanged some jokes about this chair in their correspondence. Tagore claimed that the ‘lyrical meaning’ of the poem ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’ by Baudelaire, which Ocampo had tried to read with him without success (Tagore had mischievously given Baudelaire the name of ‘furniture poet’) had at last been revealed to him by means of this armchair. Ocampo wrote back: ‘So, at last, you understood Baudelaire through my armchair!…I hope that you may understand, through that same piece of furniture, what the lyrical meaning of my devotion is! I hope, at least, part of its meaning shall be revealed to you! The part a confortable [sic] seat can reveal …(Helas! it is only a small part)…’ (Dyson, pp. 384-85 and p. 394). The possible connection between this chair and some recurrent images in Tagore’s visual art is also discussed in my book (pp. 322-27).

  245. No. 11 of Shesh Lekha: The use of the river-name Rupnarayan is pregnant with meaning. Rupnarayan is a river flowing through West Bengal that falls into the Hooghly near its mouth. A few miles upstream from the point where it joins the Hooghly stands the town of Tamluk, the Tamralipti of ancient times and once a flourishing maritime port. The river here is now a fairly long way away from the sea, but it is still accessible to tides and is at such times dangerous to navigate. Near the junction of the Rupnarayan and the Hooghly the famous James and Mary sands were the scene of many boatwrecks in the near past. The name Rupnarayan is a compound formed of two words, rup, meaning appearance, manifest form, beauty etc., and narayan, which is one of the names of Vishnu. The whole can be glossed as ‘this ever-changing world of manifest forms, which is God, this life, this visible reality which is sacred’. Thus the river, both by virtue of its geographical identity and its philosophical-sounding name, becomes symbolic. Waking up on its bank is enlightenment, knowing what the world really is. It is no dream, as navigating this tidal river is no joke. As this river meets the sea, so life meets death. The proximity of danger reveals our own identity to us. In line 6 the word ‘countenance’ translates rup, a conscious echo of the river-name. On the bank of Rupnarayan the poet sees his own rup written in the script of blood. Self-knowledge has come to him through repeated suffering. Truth is hard, as this river is hard to sail on. But the poet has never flinched from it, and the sea, which is death, is very near.

  246-47. No. 15 of Shesh Lekha: This is Tagore’s last poem, dictated in the early hours of the morning before being carried to the operation-table. Unlike No. 14, which he first dictated and afterwards corrected, he never had a chance to revise or correct this poem. He did not recover from the after-effects of the operation and died a week later. Note that this last statement is addressed to a cosmic feminine principle, an enchantress-mother, to submit to whose wiles is to gain lasting peace. Compare it with poems like ‘Hope Against Hope’ of Chaitali and nos. 89 and 90 of Naibedya.

  264. Song No. 28: Fields of mustard need no comment as such, for mustard is grown in Britain too, but it would probably help readers to know that mustard occupies an important place in the Indian kitchen and hence in cultivation. Not only are mustard-seeds used both whole and in ground form, but also in certain parts of the Indian subcontinent, such as Bengal and Kashmir, the pungently aromatic oil expressed from mustard-seeds is the preferred medium of cooking. In such areas large tracts of land are devoted to the cultivation of the mustard-plant and are quite a sight to see when the fields are in flower. Tagore has himself written elsewhere about his fascination for mustard-fields and his attachment to the fragrance of mustard-flowers. I translate two brief extracts below:

  ‘Midday; by the house of the milkmen in front of me the blossoms in a mustard-field are like fire…’ (Letter written from Potisar, 29 November 1895, Chhinnapatrabali, p. 340.)

  ‘This fragrance of the mustard-field enchants me so much…it is as if the deep happy memory of the satisfied love and absolute peace of some distant time is associated with that smell of mustard-flowers.’ (Letter written en route to Shahjadpur, 11 December 1895, Chhinnapatrabali, p. 346.)

  Shortly after translating this song, I myself happened to travel in Kashmir in the month of April, when the whole valley seemed to be a witness to the truth of Tagore’s song.

  268. Song No. 35: The swinging of Krishna and Radha in the forest, often depicted in Indian miniature art and celebrated as a monsoon festival, could be regarded as the general backdrop to a lyric like this. In addition, there could well be the personal memory of a particular pictorial scene behind it. Tagore has reminisced how in a villa in Chandernagore, overlooking the Ganges, where he spent some idyllic months as a young man in the company of Jyotirindranath and Kadambari (not ‘the villa of the Banerjees’ at Telenipara referred to once before, but another one called ‘Moran Sahib’s villa’ to which they moved) one of the stained glass windows in the lounge depicted a couple swinging by themselves in a swing suspended from a leafy tree in a secluded bower dappled with light and shadows (Tagore, Jibansmriti, quoted and discussed in Pal, vol. 2, 1st edition, p. 153, or vol. 2, 2nd edition, pp. 116-17). The picture of the swing is remembered by Tagore in Jibansmriti (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 17, pp. 391-92).

  269. Song No. 37: See the entries on ashok and polash in the Glossary. I have not commented on Tagore’s references to the red colour elsewhere, but as the second stanza of this song is such a paean in praise of red, a comment would not be out of place here. There is good reason to believe that Tagore suffered from a form of red-green blindness known as protanopia, of genetic origin, in which red is lost to vision. Statements he made during his lifetime, the evidence given by certain contemporaries, and his use of colours in his paintings would point in that direction. Travelling in Italy, for instance, he could not respond very much to fields of red poppies in flower, which almost engulfed the countryside like a spreading fire, but he used to get immense pleasure from looking at various shades of blue and violet. See R.W. Pickford and J. Bose, ‘Colour Vision and Aesthetic Problems in Pictures by Rabindranath Tagore’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 27, no. 1, Winter 1987. It is well known that blue and violet were his favourite colours. He was very attached to the flower-clusters of the Petrea volubilis, L., Verbenaceae, giving it the name nilmonilata (blue-jewel-creeper). Note his love of blue and violet in poem no. 27 of Shesh Saptak, poem no. 8 of Patraput, song no. 28 etc. He was once asked why he liked the polash so much, in that case. He replied that it was because the polash was not just red, but had a lot of yellow mixed in it, and there was also a contrast with the dark green, nearly black colour (of the calyx); he also pointed to the beautiful shape of the flower (Nirmalkumari Mahalanobis, Baishe Srabon (Mitra o Ghosh, Calcutta, 3rd impression, 1966), pp. 47-48).

  Immediately after completing the translation project which led to the present book, I went on to undertake an interdisciplinary project, in collaboration with other research colleagues, on looking carefully at Tagore’s use of colours in his writings and visual art. This investigation resulted in the following book: Dyson, Adhikary et al., Ronger Rabindranath (Ananda, Calcutta, 1997). Subsequently I wrote an article in English summarising our main findings, entitled ‘Rabindranath Tagore and His World of Colours’, which was published in July 2001 in the web magazine Parabaas (www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/ articles/pKetaki2.html). A paper adapted from this article was presented by me at an international Tagore conference at the University of Toronto in November 2005 and is available in Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon, edited by Kathleen and Joseph O’Connel
l (Visva-Bharati, Calcutta, 2009).

  In poem no. 106 of Gitanjali, translated for the present edition, the phrase ‘suffering’s red glare’ is a characteristic Tagore colour image. There is an ambiguity in his literary use of the colour red, which occasionally has traditional festive associations, but more often has a negative connotation, connected with death, darkness, violence, suffering, shame, embarrassment, humiliation etc.

  271. Song No. 39: The second stanza of this song uses two technical terms of classical Indian music, meed and murchhana; I have translated the ideas instead of introducing the terms, so that the images can have direct impact on the reader.

  Glossary

  Achchhod: literally, ‘that which has transparent waters’, the name of a lake in the seventh-century Sanskrit work of fiction, Kadambari. See the note on ‘The Victorious Woman’ in the Notes section.

  Aghran/Agrahayan: the eighth month of the Bengali calendar and the second month of autumn, mid-November to mid-December.

  Ajay: a river that rises from the Rajmahal Hills of Bihar, flows through West Bengal, and falls into the Bhagirathi.

  amloki: a beautiful deciduous tree with feathery foliage and sour-astringent fruit which is valued medicinally and also used as a condiment, the Emblica officinalis, Gaertn., Euphorbiaceae, the same as Phyllanthus emblica, L., of the same family.

  areca: Bengali supari, the tall, slender, elegant, feather-leaved areca palm, Areca catechu, L., Arecaceae (Palmae). Its nuts, resembling nutmegs, are sliced and eaten, sometimes with betel leaves. The word areca is ultimately of South Indian origin.

  Arjun: Arjuna in Sanskrit, a celebrated character in the epic Mahabharata, one of the five Pandava brothers. For the reference in ‘Tamarind Flower’, see the entry on Chitrarath below.