Gitanjali
By Rabindranath Tagore
- Release Date: 2010-01-01
- Genre: Poetry
Description
Gitanjali (Bangla Gitanjoli) is a collection of 103 English
poems, largely translations, by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. This
volume became very famous in the West, and was widely translated.
Gitanjali (Gitanjoli) is also the title of an earlier Bengali volume
(1910) of mostly devotional songs. The word gitanjoli is composed from
"git", song, and "anjoli", offering, and thus means - "An offering of songs";
but the word for offering, anjoli, has a strong devotional connotation,
so the title may also be interpreted as "prayer offering of song".
The English collection is not a translation of poems from the Bengali volume
of the same name. While half the poems (52 out of 103) in the English text were
selected from the Bengali volume, others were taken from these works (given with
year and number of songs selected for the English text): Gitimallo
(1914,17), Noibeddo (1901,15), Khea (1906,11) and a handful from
other works. The translations were often radical, leaving out or altering large
chunks of the poem and in one instance even fusing two separate poems (song 95,
which unifies songs 89,90 of naivedya).
The translations were undertaken prior to a visit to England in 1912, where
the poems were extremely well received. A slender volume was published in 1913,
with an exhilarating preface by W. B. Yeats. In the same year, based on a corpus
of three thin translations, Rabindranath became the first non-European to win
the Nobel prize.
-- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
