I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Sarang: a group of ragas pertaining to the middle of the day, from noon to 4 p.m., serious and contemplative in mood, suggesting the heat of the sun. In ‘The Nap’ it may well be the Vrindavani Sarang, much played at weddings. In the context of the poem, it is being played in the bride’s house on the day after the wedding day and will be touched with pathos, as the bride will soon leave her parents’ home for her husband’s home.

  Saraswati: the goddess of learning and the arts. She is white, holds a vina, and rides a swan.

  seer: a unit of weight which varied in different parts of India and also a measure of capacity for fluids. I remember milk being sold in seers in my childhood; four powas made a seer. Nowadays in cities milk is sold in litres. As a unit of weight the kilogram has replaced the seer.

  serpent-maidens: fabulous creatures belonging to myths and fairy tales. Nagas and their females, naginis, are important snake-spirits or genii in Hindu mythology. They dwell in rich underwater palaces and guard aquatic treasures. In the context of the poem ‘The Boy’, the suggestion is more of creatures from children’s fairy tales than of full-blown mythological figures. The maidens the boy imagines will be of the order of supernatural princesses. They may be half-human, half-serpentine, and will naturally be ambivalent in nature – alluring but dangerous.

  Shachi: the wife of Indra.

  shaddock: also known as the pomelo or pompelmoose, a small tree bearing fragrant blossoms and fruit resembling the grapefruit, but much larger in size. The English name shaddock is derived from the name of a Capt. Shaddock who is supposed to have introduced the fruit to the West Indies. The Bengali name, batabi lebu, i.e., citrus of Batavia, indicates that the fruit was probably brought to Bengal from the East Indies. Its botanical name in most old sources is Citrus decumana, L., Rutaceae. I understand that its current name is – very appropriately – Citrus maxima.

  Shahana Ragini: the mood of this nocturnal raga would be more serious than that of Sindhu Kafi, suggesting love mixed with a sense of pathos.

  shajina: a small tree bearing panicles of sweet-smelling flowers that develop into pendulous seed-pods. Leaves, flowers, and pods are all edible. Its current Latin name is Moringa oleifera, Lamk., Moringaceae. Not so long ago it was known as Moringa pterygosperma, Gaertn. f., Moringaceae.

  shanai: a wind instrument which may be called the Indian oboe, often played at weddings and other celebrations.

  Shaon: a soft version of the month-name Srabon (q.v.).

  Shipra: a river flowing by Ujjain (q.v.).

  shirish: a large deciduous tree with a broad crown, topped with spreading limbs, bearing fragrant flowers which are white with green-tipped filaments, the Albizzia lebbek, Benth., Mimosaceae. In the winter months the pods hang from completely leafless branches.

  shishu: a large deciduous tree yielding valuable timber, the Dalbergia sissoo, Roxb., Fabaceae. Its withered flowers hang from the branches for a long time and the dry seed-pods rustle characteristically in the wind.

  shiuli: the sweet scent of the flowers of this small deciduous tree, the Nyctanthes arbor-tristis, L., Oleaceae, is associated in the Bengali mind with the post-rains season and the Puja holidays. The star-shaped white flowers with orange tubes blossom at night and in the morning can be seen carpeting the ground beneath. Shiuli flowers are a perfect emblem of the transience of beauty. The orange stalks yield a dye.

  Shiva: the third deity of the Hindu trinity of gods and one of the most important gods of Hinduism, with many roles and aspects. He is the Destroyer, the Supreme Ascetic and meditative Yogi with matted locks, as well as the consort of the Hindu Mother Goddess (variously known as Parvati, Durga, Kali etc.). He is often worshipped in the form of a phallic symbol, and many Westerners will be familiar with bronze statuettes of this god depicted as the Cosmic Dancer. The trident is one of his war-weapons.

  shulpo greens: or shulfa, from shatapushpa, should probably be identified with an umbelliferous annual plant valued medicinally and cultivated for its seeds, Anethum sowa, the aromatic leaves of which are used in pickles and chutneys, but the term could also refer to what is called wild shulfa, Fumaria indica, Pugsley, Fumariaceae (S. Bhattacharya, Chiranjib Banowshadhi, vol. 3, Ananda, Calcutta, 1978).

  Sindhu Kafi: the mood of this nocturnal raga would be a little light-hearted, with suggestions of nostalgia and romantic pain.

  sitar: Hardly needing any introduction to Western readers nowadays, this stringed instrument is descended from the vina. It is possible that there was some Persian influence on its development. The name itself is of Persian origin (setar).

  Srabon: the fourth month of the Bengali calendar and the second month of the rainy season, mid-July to mid-August.

  Sumeru: often identified with various trans-Himalayan mountains or highlands, but effectively a fabulous mountain which could be called the Olympus of Hindu mythology. Zimmer explains it as the central peak of the world, the main pin or vertical axis of the universe (Zimmer, op. cit. Notes section, p. 52). As a modern geographical term, the name refers to the North Pole, and in many contemporary Bengali compound words it is the equivalent of ‘arctic’.

  tamal: the one thing that is certain about this tree is that it has a dark bark, whence its name, and Tagore’s references to it are usually to evoke a scene and a mood, echoic, reminiscent of Kalidasa. Should we identify it with the Xanthochymus pictorius of Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary, or is it perhaps the Diospyros tomentosa, Roxb., Ebenaceae, as has also been suggested?

  tamarind: the Tamarindus indica, L., Caesalpiniaceae, a large beautiful tree with a dense round crown of feathery foliage, valued for its timber and acid fruit. The English name tamarind is of Arabic origin meaning ‘the date of India’. The Bengali name tentul is of Sanskrit origin. The tamarind is not famous for its flowers, yet its racemes of fragrant pale yellow flowers streaked with red are lovely. The flowers develop into brown pods inside which the seeds are embedded in the soft brown acid pulp which is widely used in cookery, not only in India but also in the preparation of certain well-known bottled relishes in the British market, such as HP sauce and Worcestershire sauce.

  Tamasa: Geographically, there are several rivers in India bearing this name. What matters is that on the border of one of these the poet Valmiki (q.v.) is said to have uttered his first lines of poetry.

  Taxila: or Takshashila, an ancient and powerful city of the Punjab, the site of which is now in Pakistan.

  Terai: The word torai in Bengali primarily means any damp land at the base of a mountain. In the context of geography it can also refer specifically to the belt of marshy and jungly land lying between the Himalayan foothills and the plains. Because of the absence of capitalisation in the Bengali script there is nothing except the context to indicate the precise meaning. In poem no. 27 of Shesh Saptak both meanings would fit the context. I have chosen to translate it as I have for the sake of convenience. The name ‘Terai’ has been used in English in the context of geographical descriptions for two centuries.

  tuberose: the Polianthes tuberosa, L., Amaryllidaceae, a small plant growing from a tuberous root, with very fragrant white funnel-shaped flowers that shed their fragrance at night (hence the Bengali name rajanigandha, ‘night-fragrant’).

  Ujjain: properly Ujjayini, now in the state of Madhya Pradesh, has been an important city from very ancient times and is also one of the sacred cities of India. It was specially meaningful to Tagore because of its association with Kalidasa, who describes it in his Meghaduta.

  Urbashi: a celestial nymph and dancer at Indra’s court, whose advances to the hero Arjun were rejected by him.

  Valmiki: the supposed author of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. The Ramayana itself relates how Valmiki, after bathing in the Tamasa, was wandering in the bordering woods when a hunter shot dead the male of a pair of mating birds. The female began to lament the death of her partner. Profoundly upset and moved, Valmiki uttered a curse on the hunter. Having done so, he was astonished at what he had done and slowly re
alised that he had uttered two lines in formal metre. In Indian tradition this is the birth of poetry, of genuinely human poetical composition, as different from verses which are divine revelations. In poem no. 3 of Shesh Saptak, the shaddock tree’s astonishment at its own self-renewal is compared to Valmiki’s primal astonishment at his own poetic creation.

  vetiver: the roots of a fragrant grass, the Andropogon muricatus, Retz., Gramineae, which are made into mattings or screens called tatties and placed in door and window openings during hot dry weather, where they are kept constantly wet so that the air indoors becomes cool and aromatised. This grass seems to have a host of other Latin names. The current one could well be Vetiveria zizanioides: I saw it in a recent issue of the New Scientist. The word vetiver is ultimately from Tamil and came to English through French. The Bengali word, khaskhas (Anglo-Indian cuscus), is of Persian origin.

  vina: Described to me by a practising Indian musician as ‘the mother-instrument of the Indian stringed instruments’, the vina belongs to the lute family and is still used. It has a very sweet tone and usually has two resonating gourds, one at each end.

  water-lily: refers to a tropical variety, Bengali nal, most probably the Nymphaea nouchali, Burm. f., Nymphaeaceae.

  About the Author

  Ketaki Kushari Dyson was born in Calcutta in 1940 and studied English literature at Calcutta and Oxford, obtaining firsts from both universities. She also holds a doctorate from Oxford. She settled in Britain after her marriage to an Englishman, but did not give up writing in her first language and her links with the literary life of her native Bengal. She writes in both Bengali and English and belongs to that small minority of poets who write poetry in two languages. Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, translator, scholar, and critic, and well-known for her skill in mixing the genres, she is the author of more than thirty titles in her two languages, including ten full-length poetry collections, and is regarded as an outstanding Bengali writer of her generation. She received the Bhubanmohini Dasi Medal of the University of Calcutta for eminent contribution to contemporary Bengali letters (1986), the Ananda Award twice (in 1986, and again in 1997 in conjunction with a coauthor), and in 2009 was felicitated by the TV channel Star Ananda for being the Best Bengali of the Year in Literature. She led an interdisciplinary research project on the effects of Tagore’s protanopic colour vision on his writings and visual art, leading to a major scholarly publication (Dyson, Adhikary et al., Ronger Rabindranath, Ananda, Calcutta, 1997).

  Her English publications include two acclaimed scholarly books, A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765-1856 (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1978, second edition 2002, Oxford India paperbacks, 2006), and In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, 1988, reprinted 1996). Her Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose was published by Oxford University Press, Delhi, in 2003. Her edition I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems by Rabindranath Tagore was first published by Bloodaxe Books in 1991 and reissued in an expanded second edition in 2010, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

  She was for a period a Research Associate at Oxford’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, for which she co-edited Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second-Language Use (Berg, Oxford/Providence, 1994).

  For a full list of her published books, visit her website at: http://www.virgiliolibro.com/kkd

  Copyright

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Ketaki Kushari Dyson 1991, 2010

  First edition published 1991.

  Second expanded edition published 2010 by

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd,

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  Northumberland NE48 1RP.

  This ebook edition first published in 2011.

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  The right of Ketaki Kushari Dyson to be identified as translator and author of this edition has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN: 978 1 78037 018 7 ebook