Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS September 16 2011 from Seamus Perry's review of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (translated by William Radice); The Essential Tagore (edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty); Boyhood Days (translated by Radha Chakravarty); and Farewell Song (translated by Radha Chakravarty): Tagore's familiarity with the nineteenth-century poets was evidently very deep, and in his critical pronouncements, he can sound the clear high note of Romantic idealism which Yeats would have recognized. "The world becomes another world in our mind.... This act of the mind enables us to individualize external reality"; and an even more strikingly Yeatsian turn, "How to express the world the mind creates within itself? It has to be expressed in such a manner that it leads to a mood". * Many of Tagore's best writings are animated by a similar sense, sympathetic but accepting, of the unshapely desultoriness of the lives that they narrate, as though exploring th...

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) began drawing and painting at the age of sixty-three. He grew up among artists but had no formal training himself. I found his drawings of animals and biomorphic forms and his portraits, on show at Asia Society , beautiful and mesmerizing. He did not title his works because he did not want words to come between the viewer and the artwork, but his lifelong work with words surely influenced his art, and gave him its central conception, that of rhythm. A happy coincidence that I was teaching just then Coleridge's "The Aeolian Harp," in which he describes "the one life within us and abroad" as "rhythm in all thought." "Seated Woman: forward bend" (c. 1930-31), done with colored ink and watercolors on paper, is a dark enameled egg. The early ink-on-paper work "Striding Bird" (1928) is calligraphy in motion. I did not care so much for Tagore's landscapes, which struck me as rather sentimental and uno...

I'm reading Joe Winter's translation of Song Offerings ( Gitanjali ). According to Winter, Tagore wrote Gitanjali from 1906-10, but mostly in the last three months of that period. These poems were written as poems to be read on the page. Tagore turned them into songs as or shortly after he wrote. Winter describes the relationship between poems and songs in this way: "It is as songs that they are known far and wide by Bengali-speakers; yet the text still has a spoken voice." Winter also describes usefully the publication and reception of the English Gitanjali : Tagore translated a number of the Gitanjali into English in 1912, at first, while recovering from illness and without the energy, as he put it, 'to sit down and write anything new'. He continued the exercise on a voyage to England that year, his first serious venture into English translation, and arrived with a manuscript made up half of Gitanjali re-creations and half of pieces from nine other of hi...

From a deep appreciation of the varied imperfections of earth, Tagore's poems yearn for the single, perfect ineffable. The narrative poems tell the stories of ordinary people, but tell them in such a manner as to evoke that deep yearning, so that the ordinary matter is suffused with immense dignity. The allegorical poems are dream-like and imaginative, at once passive and active. The lyrics are his supreme achievement, to my mind. Ardent, yet harmonious, they map human love onto the love of God. According to Radice, the ideas in "Yaksha" lead right into the heart of Tagore's religious and artistic thought. In Creative Unity (p. 35), in the chapter on the Creative Ideal, Tagore writes: "this world is a creation . . . in its center there is a living idea which reveals itself in an eternal symphony, played on innumerable instruments, all keeping perfect time." Radice identifies this 'living idea' with the Yaksa's ideal, with his Beloved. However, t...

My last night in Singapore. I am flying back to NYC tomorrow, transferring at Heathrow, and I am so ready to leave. The weather has been intolerably hot, only slightly cooler after the rains of the past two days. I saw a lot of friends this time: former school-mates, national service mates, ex-colleagues from the school I taught at, writer-friends, clubbing friends. I enjoyed catching up with people, but felt as if I was dropping in on their lives, parachuting in, and then ejecting out, and their lives continue as before, like mine. Since I no longer live here, in any meaningful sense, these brief meetings are like the rains: intense, over quickly, hopeful of new growth. Tagore, whom I've been reading in Singapore, loves the rain. For him, it represents inspiration, refreshment, vitality. His poem on rain begins: "My heart, it dances like a peacock, it dances, it dances." He is a marvelous lyric poet, but allies his lyric gift with metaphysical daring. "Last Honey...