Translation of Tagore

Since Aurobindo, there have been only very few Indians writing about art and aesthetics in the English language, though criticism is a very strong component of our regional literatures. Rabindranath Tagore was a poet and translator, and his Gitanjali , for which he got the Nobel Prize, was translated by Tagore himself. But his poems and stories were also translated by others, often under his supervision. He has explained why he translated Gitanjali into English: “I simply felt an urge to recapture, through the medium of another language, the feeling and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in past days” and that “I was making fresh acquaintance with my own heart by dressing it in other clothes” (qtd in Sujit Mukherjee: 104). Sujit Mukherjee points out that “these are not the normal stances of a translator” and that we can detect a “…note of uncertainty, almost a tone of apology, as if he knew that what he was doing was not quite valid in literary terms” (104). Mukherjee observes how the Bangla Gitanjali is not considered by Bengali readers as the best of Tagore's works. The English Gitanjali has only a portion of the Bangla original and has parts from other Bangla works Naivedya, Kheya and Gitimalya . Tagore was basically catering to the tastes of his English readers who avidly took in the devotional or mystic aspects of his poetry. Although this was a deliberate act by Tagore himself, this was misrepresentation because this translation highlighted some aspects of his creative work and downplayed certain others. This resulted in the creation of two different images of Tagore in Bangla and Tagore in English translation. This is what prompts Sujit Mukherjee to term Tagore's translation this as “perjury” – “the act of knowingly making a false statement on a matter material to the issue in question” (124). Tagore and his English translations have been the subject of many studies by others as well, focusing on this aspect. Mary Lago points to the perils of such translation when she writes about the legacy of Tagore: “If younger readers recognize his name, it summons up, more often than not, impressions of a stereotyped mystical man from the East; they have still too few means of discovering all the power and beauty that, in the passage from Bengali to English, went astray” (421). This shows how important the translations were in the making of Tagore the man and the author.