Bengal already had a distinguished lineage of stylists in the English language at the time he undertook the 'translations'--the novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, the poet Michael Madhushudhan Dutt, and the historian R.C. Dutt among them. Interestingly, for many of these writers, their English writings had been a preliminary to the Bengali works through which they then made their reputations. There was, for instance, Michael Madhushudhan Dutt's return, after years of writing verse in English, to his native tongue with Meghnadavadha Kavya (1861), and Bankimchandra's brief flirtation with English in his first novel Rajmohan's Wife (1864), before he set about the task of establishing himself as the first major novelist in the Bengali language. Tagore's poems are 'translation' in only a very general sense; many of the poems in the English Gitanjali are not to be found in the Bengali one, but are taken from three other sources, Naivedya, Kheya, and Gitimalya. The translations turned out to be substantial reworkings, many of them different in almost every imaginable sense from the originals. Moreover, they launched Tagore's international career and contributed to the myth in the West, subscribed to by many readers at the time, and perhaps a handful even today, that Tagore was a poet who wrote in English.

Tagore had completed Jiban Sriti, in which he had made... cutting and jocular remarks about English and the English lessons of his childhood, in 1911; the following year he translated the Gitanjali into the language he had once found tedious and ridiculous; in 1913, amazed by the success of the poems, he wrote a letter to his niece Indira Devi, in which we hear a new note of hesitancy regarding the language. Somewhat misleadingly, and with excessive modesty, he declared the tentativeness he had always felt in relation to the English language:

‘You have alluded to the English translation of the Gitanjali. I cannot imagine to this day how people came to like it so much. That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the vanity to feel ashamed of it. If anybody wrote an English note asking me for tea, I did not feel equal to answering it. Perhaps you think that by now I have got over that delusion. By no means. That I have written in English seems to be the delusion.’

He goes on to say: 'But believe me, I did not undertake this task in a spirit of reckless bravado. I simply felt an urge to recapture through the medium of another language the feelings and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in the days gone by.'

That Tagore was attempting to 'recapture' in 'another language' rather than 'translate' is borne out by how little effort he expended on approximating the metre and content, and even the literary temperament-- precise, controlled--that produced the original songs (for the Bengali Gitanjali is predominantly a book of songs). The language of the English Gitanjali is, to say the least, problematic. While the Indian poets who had earlier written in English--Derozio and members of the Dutt family among others--show the influence of both literary models from the English canon and British Orientalist poetry, a poetry often inflected with Persian motifs, and sometimes incorporating historical material, Tagore's prose-poems, ahistorical and more fluid in form and intent than any English literary model would allow, seem apparently little indebted to either.

The poems themselves were received, to a large extent, as Eastern wisdom, and Tagore is open to the speculation that he might have deliberately positioned himself, in these poems and in public life, as an Eastern mystic for the eyes of the West. However, there is ample evidence to show that Tagore had arrived at most of his mystical accoutrements well before he would have had any inkling that he was to become, briefly, a magus in Europe. Moreover, a substantial part of Tagore's 'Eastern' mysticism was actually quite Western and Victorian in its thrust, involving a sharp Ruskin-like critique of utilitarian values, and a valorizing of the autonomy and sanctity of the world of art. The proper thrust of this critique can only be assessed if one recalls that it would have been formulated, at its onset, primarily as a reaction to a Bengali society obsessed with professional qualifications and scientific knowledge for the sake of career advancements, and which had no definition or space for writing as a full-time occupation.

Looking back on the English prose-poems themselves, it seems puzzling now that they were ever read or enjoyed for their message or philosophy, mystical or otherwise; so reticent and deliberately uncommunicative are they. Firstly, only a few years before the birth of Practical Criticism, with its emphasis on the autonomy of each poem, and in

marked contrast to the finished and individual nature of the 'originals', these prose-poems, confusingly, flow into each other, as if the boundaries and frames separating them were blurred; one might easily mistake one poem for another. The propagation of any 'message' is deflected by the creation, within the English Gitanjali, of a dreamscape of repeated words and symbols--'flute', 'instrument', 'lamp', 'song', 'garland', 'Lord', 'guest', 'leisure'; what remains with the reader afterwards is neither content, message, observation, nor conceit, but this unresolved network, this dreamscape. The biblical overtones of some of the passages are undermined by the repetition of certain words and phrases that point towards a culture that is both unbiblical and unWestern. For instance, exhortations such 'No work for the day!' and phrases like 'overflowing leisure' evoke heat, indolence, and the space reserved for rest; a celebration of idleness that is rare in English poetry, except when qualified by proper Protestant ambivalence as in 'The Lotus Eaters' and certain stanzas of the Faerie Queen. Similarly, the biblical 'Lord' present in many of these poems is also sometimes addressed, unsettlingly, by the quite unbiblical appellations of 'friend' and 'singer'; these are echoes of Vaishnavite and local folk traditions that had entered and shaped Tagore's artistic world, acting in the English Gitanjali as counters representing another tradition, serving here not to illuminate, but to disrupt the continuity of any single (biblical or otherwise) tonality. One might conclude by saying that, for a sequence of poems that had gained such popularity, the English Gitanjali says alarmingly little and keeps drawing attention to its textuality and its unresolved linguistic tensions. Firstly, to the fact of its being composed in English, without the poet having observed the proprieties or niceties of the English literary tradition; secondly, by constantly referring, though a series of repetitions, to the presence of another language and thereby, to the pressure of another culture and way of life (as a translation, whose aim is to recreate the original impregnably in terms of the target language, would never do). On one level, thus, the English Gitanjali is a poor translation; on another, it is a genuine instance, albeit only a partially successful one, of an Indian bilingual sensibility expressing itself in the English language. The force of Tagore's bilingual (indeed, multilingual) sensibility made his Bengali poems polished, subtle, both preternaturally sensitive to the fleeting sensory stimulus and adept at making the generalized observation: it made his English poems loose, wordy, and reticent at once, a site where categories were mixed up and realigned.

Some of the poems themselves, moreover, provide their own commentary; language and its contingent problems are constantly referred to, indicating how Tagore had struggled to arrive at his idiom even in Bengali. In the English version, the narrative of this struggle has its own peculiar resonance. In Poem 3 (22 in the Bengali Gitanjali), we find, 'My heart longs to join in thy song, but vainly struggles for a voice. I would speak, but speech breaks not into song, and I cry out baffled.' Poem 37 (55 in the Bengali collection) ends with 'And when old worlds die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders', which refers to many things, including Tagore's achievements in Bengalis, the historical moment of that achievement, the attempt at 'recapturing…feelings and sentiments' in 'another language' that was Tagore's present undertaking; it is also prescient of the great leap that both Indian poetry and Tagore's reputation would take, purely in terms of Western attention, with the publication of the poems.

Some of the liberties that Tagore takes with his translations are telling as well. The very first poem, 'Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure' (which, as a matter of interest, is absent for the Bengali collection, and is taken from Gitimalya), has the sentence: 'At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable'. Here, 'ineffable' is Tagore's addition; there is no word corresponding to it in the Bengali version. It might have been added to compound the mystical tenor of the sentence; but it also signals to the reader, especially the reader of both versions, the limits of the new language, and the difficulties of the poet's undertaking in an idiom that leads him towards what cannot be spoken.

[…The issue, finally, is not so much whether Tagore wrote English well or badly; that particular debate risks ignoring the complexity of his engagement with the language. Paradoxically, it is his English, the language of his public and international persona, that is shaped by his cultural confusion, personal drives, inspirations, and limitations, more nakedly than his Bengali, where the formal accomplishments at first conceals…contradictions; and these contradictions at least partly hold the key to an understanding of Tagore's achievement, his (later) marginalization in the West, and his continuing interest to us today.]

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist and essayist.