WHEN I promised to do this book, two years ago, I knew I was foolish. My task would have been difficult, had my subject been an English writer. There is no Western author of repute whose pen is not frugal, compared with Rabindranath Tagore’s. Through days filled to overflowing with other work I have been oppressed by the knowledge that, even in my own tongue, Rabindranath was all the while lecturing and writing faster than I could hope to read. I cannot pretend to have read more than a considerable fraction of the enormous output of his fifty years of incessant activity. Much of that output has never got beyond the magazines. My comfort is that perhaps not one of his own countrymen has read the whole of it.
Those who have themselves made the effort of compressing a vast theme into a small handbook will be the most lenient to my shortcomings. The poet has enjoyed nine years of world-wide fame, yet this little book is, so far as my knowledge goes, the only essay in English which is in any degree based upon study of the original Bengali. This surprising fact justifies an Englishman’s attempt. I believe the poet is misunderstood in the West — is underpraised, by some overpraised, is wrongly praised. But his own countrymen have been content to grumble. Not one has come forward to help the world to place a poet who cannot be ignored but of whom every possible opinion is entertained in Europe and America, from his apotheosis as the last and most wonderful teacher of the ages to his contemptuous dismissal as a charlatan.
I am indebted to the Modern Review (published, Calcutta), which for many years has been a mirror of his activities, especially as prosewriter and travelling lecturer, and is invaluable on that side of his work. Its editor, Babu Ramananda Chatterji, has made prompt and generous response to many calls which I have made on his knowledge. I owe a debt to the brilliant sketch of the Neo-Romantic Movement in Bengal, in Dr. Brajendranath Seal’s New Essays in Criticism, and to Ajitkumar Chakrabarti’s little book, Rabindranath. I owe a debt which I cannot exaggerate to Babu Prasanta Mahalanobis; without his help I could have done nothing. That help has left its mark on every page. Among colleagues, Babu Sarojkumar Biswas has helped me with Bengali texts. Among students, Satyakinkar Kabiraj has read many hundreds of pages of Rabindranath’s poetry with me and given invaluable assistance in translation, so that my versions are often as much his as mine; Narayanchandra Ghosh has an equal claim to the passage quoted from Evening Songs, in Chapter III. The Rev. A. M. Spencer read proofs.
Translations, except when from Gitanjali or My Reminiscences, are my own or by the two students mentioned above. I thank the poet for generous permission to translate and for the gift of his portrait. Transliteration of proper names presented a problem. It seemed best to follow Dr. Farquhar’s advice. So I have used Bengali forms throughout, except in the case of Kalidasa, Valmiki, and Vidyapati. Every well-known name I have treated as anglicised, extending this rule to cover as many words as possible. Thus, I have printed Bolpur and not Bôlpur, Rabindranath and not Rabindranath, Brahmo Samaj and not Brahmo Samaj, Kalidasa and not Kalidasa. Lastly, in words treated as unnaturalised I have ignored all marks of length or consonantal distinction, except the two which are essential to approximately correct pronunciation — i.e.. I have marked only ô and à (the vowel a, as distinct from the included vowel which every Bengali consonant carries, which, though transliterated as a, is pronounced far more as a short o in English). In ignoring the alleged difference between short i and long i, short “and long u, I have the support of my own ears and of the poet’s express testimony that there is no difference (in pronunciation, that is). I have not printed sakta but sakta; not Chandi but Chandi. To sum up: I have treated as unnaturalised only titles of books and a very few other words, including proper names of characters in Rabindranath Tagore’s books. This will not please the scholar. But I have written for the general reader, who finds an abundance of dots and accents vexing.
The reader who cares for a much fuller and more detailed examination of Tagore’s work will find it in my Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford University Press; shortly).
Wesleyan College, Bankura, 16-7-1921. E. J. T.