The translations I did for this book in the early 1980s are probably known to many of you. It is convenient for me to use them today, as I need to quote Tagore in English translation, and obviously my own translations are the ones I know best. But there is another, more important reason why I want to quote them. Above all, when I worked on this book, I wanted to convey in English what I felt to be Tagore’s true qualities of poetic greatness, in a way that I did not think had been satisfactorily conveyed before, whether in his own translations or in translations by others. In order to explain to you what I was trying to achieve, I need to go into the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the translations more than I have done before in a lecture; which may also reveal the nuts and bolts of Tagore’s poems in the original more than has perhaps been done by any critic in English, and possibly not in Bengali either. 

‘Tagore’ and ‘greatness’ are very easily linked, because of his iconic status in Bengal and in India as a whole, not to mention other countries; because of his long life and vast influence; his central role in the formation of modern Indian nationhood; his noble appearance; his wide and human sympathies; and his profound spiritual insight. But I wonder if the prominence of his greatness in all these aspects has distracted us from his actual greatness as a poet. After all, it is possible to be wise, good, humane, brave and influential without being a poet. To be a great poet you need to write great poems, and that requires a number of purely literary gifts and qualities, some of which are quite technical.

 Let us consider some of the things in Maran-milan that makes it such a great poem. Firstly there is the astonishing technical control: the unerring use of metre, rhyme and verse structure to echo perfectly Death’s quiet footsteps. Listen to the first stanza in Bengali:
 
 

ata      cupi cupi kena katha kao 
           ogo       maran, he mor maran, 
ati       dhire ese kena ceye rao, 
           ogo       eki pranayer-i dharan! 
yabe    sandhyabelay phul-dal 
           pare     klanta brinte namiya, 
yabe    phire ase gothe gabhidal 
           sara     din-man mathe bhramiya, 
tumi     pase asi basa acapal 
           ogo      ati mridugati-caran. 
ami      bujhi na ye ki ye katha kao 
           ogo      maran, he mor maran. 

In the Bengali, the regular (lines 2 and 12) placing of the refrain - ogo maran, he mor maran - is one of the most mesmeric things about this poem. I decided that this might not work so well in English: ‘O my Death’ is not a happy phrase, and doesn’t in itself have that quiet, creeping quality the poem requires. So instead I have the simple, quiet spondee ‘Death, Death’; and I let it move around in the stanza. I felt that this would express the steady, yet unpredictable footsteps of Death more effectively than keeping it in a fixed position. 

As regards metre, I did not follow Tagore’s six foot/four foot alternating pattern, but I did pick up the trochaic character of the six foot lines, and the fact that the four foot lines are more ‘accentual’, with four main stresses, but with variation in the number of light syllables between them: 

ati      dhire ese kena ceye rao,
     ogo     eki pranayer-i dharan!

Make the whole night ring…
Grasp me by the hand…
Pay no heed to what…
 
 

 Then there is its energy and vitality of language: Tagore’s vastness of vocabulary, from the classicism of compound phrases such as bijayoddhat dhvajapat (for Death’s victory-flag) to colloquial Bengali reduplicative and onomatopoeic expressions such as kinkini-ranrani (for his jingling ankle-bells) and babam-babam (for Siva’s cheek-slapping). (Tagore called such expressions dhvanatmak-sabda, ‘sound-soul-words’, and compiled a comprehensive list of them.)

 Then there is the poem’s moral depth and sincerity. Here is a poet who is prepared to tackle the deepest, most cosmic, most universal themes: in the case of this poem, the mysterious power of Death, whose edicts we cannot resist and can never fully understand. 

Yet there is in this poem, solemn though it is, wit as well: Gauri’s reactions to Siva as bridegroom and of her parents too are comically reminiscent of an ordinary Bengali domestic scene (‘…and in his mind/Her father agreed calamity had struck’). For me, wit is an essential ingredient of great poetry. It is always there, because the skilful use of language in poetry involves word-play, which is by definition witty. Wit, too, is the handmaid of wisdom: a great poem needs to be many-sided, to be open to different points of view. A wise man is always humorous; a narrow-minded fanatic never is.

 All in all, these elements working together in concert - verse-form, rhythm, structure, language, feeling, imagery, moral depth, wit - embody that power of poetic mind that makes a great poet, distinguishes him from the second-rate. It was that quality of mind that I felt was lacking in earlier translations of Tagore, including his own, and which I was so anxious to capture.
 

I should like now to consider these elements in more detail, looking for illustrations in other poems in my Selected Poems of Tagore. 

Although my translations have generally been well received over the years, especially in India, and I am very grateful for that, readers have not always been aware of the novel and intricate technical devices that went into their making. In my latest book of Tagore translations, Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems (HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2000; Angel Books, London, 2001), my devices are as intricate and varied as ever - but because I have learnt to integrate them into language that seems easy, natural and inevitable, readers have probably scarcely noticed them at all. Maybe Tagore himself paid a similar price. His skills with metre and rhyme and verse-form are so subtle, varied and sophisticated, yet at the same time so natural and apparently effortless, that readers of the original may often forget what a virtuoso he was.

 So far as I know, no critic or reviewer of my translations has commented on their technical innovations. Yet for me, that is a particularly interesting aspect, because it demonstrates how in translating a great poet who possesses a whole range of techniques that are novel in English one can enhance English poetry’s technical resources.

 A few examples.
 
 

(a) Gaps

 A few lines from Badhu (‘Bride’, 1890) will display the technique to you:

               Pitcher at my hip, the winding path -
   Nothing but fields to the left                       stretching into haze,
              To the right the slanting bamboo-grove.
    The evening sunlight shines                       on the blackness of the pool,
              The woods round its edge are sunk in shade.
    I let myself idly float                                  in the pool’s deep calm,
              The koel on the bank has sweetness in its song.
    Returning, I suddenly see                          above the dark trees.
              Painted on the sky, the moon.

(b) Tabla-rhythms

My past days bulging with the sap of the turbulence of youth - 
O master of cyclic Time, are you indifferent to them now,
           O tranced ascetic?
Have they with kimsuk blossoms on gusty Caitra nights
Blown away, have they floated uncared-for off into infinite sky?
Have they on rafts of slim white rainless post-monsoon cloud
Drifted at the whim of arbitrary winds to moor on oblivion 
           Through harsh neglect?

Those days that once so colourfully decked your matted yellow locks
With white and red and blue and yellow flowers -
           Are they all forgotten?
In the end they laughingly stole your beggar’s tabor and horn
And gave you flute and anklets; they filled your drinking-bowl
With potent distillations of the heavy scents of spring;
They drowned the dense inertia of your trance 
           In an upsurge of sweetness.
 

bulging with the...
turbulence of...
drifted at the...
arbitrary...
colourfully...
distillations of the...
heavy scents of...
inertia of your...

(c) Stanzas

Satanic machine, you enable man to fly. 
     Land and sea had fallen to his power:
         All that was left was the sky.

God has given as a gift a bird’s two wings.
     From the flash of feathery line and colour
         Spiritual joy springs…

The ABA rhyme scheme I use is familiar to us from terza rima; but notice that my lines decrease in length - first five feet, then four, then three. There are plenty of tabla-rhythms too. 

Or listen to Bir-purush (‘The Hero’, 1903):
 
 

Say we made a journey, mother,
Roaming far and wide together -
      You would have a palanquin,
      Doors kept open just a chink,
      I would ride a red horse, clip 
Clop-clip along beside you, lifting 
      Clouds of red dust with my clatter.

The four-foot trochaic lines may not seem particularly novel, but in each verse there is a rhythmic twist in line 6, which starts with an iamb, not a trochee (‘Clop-clip’ in this verse). I’ve also used an elaborate rhyme scheme which, as often in my translations and in my own poems, uses half-rhymes rather than full rhymes. (I tend to use half-rhyme in translations as it leads to fewer distortions of meaning for the sake of form; but having learnt the technique essentially from translation I’ve enjoyed using it in my own poems too.) In verse 1 above, lines 1, 2 and 7 are half-rhymed on ‘feminine’ endings: ‘mother’, ‘together’, ‘clatter’. Line 6 doesn’t have a rhyme, but it also has a feminine ending. Lines 3, 4, and 5 are ‘masculine’, and are half-rhymed on the vowel, not the consonant: 

…palanquin
…chink
…clip

(d) Sari-poems

You must immediately wonder what on earth I mean by sari-poems. Well, it’s a term I have used elsewhere for poems that ‘walk across the page’ to create a characteristic visual shape. I know of no poet in English who has set out lines in that way. To my eye, it has something of the wrap-around, asymmetrical grace of a sari, and I carefully tried to achieve it in my translations, spending many hours (before the days of word-processing) with scissors and paste, placing pages end to end on the floor so that the whole poem looked right. Some poems of this sort are rhymed in the original, some are unrhymed. So I have also sometimes used (half) rhyme, though not usually in couplets - I distribute the rhymes more widely than that, which means the reader may not notice them; yet the discipline they exert is real, because for every line-ending I need a partner for it somewhere - a line half-rhyming or even fully rhyming with it somewhere. 

I could go on and on, but nuts and bolts lose their interest after a while except to the person fixing them, so I shall restrain myself from offering you even more technicalities! The important point to stress is that Tagore would not be a great poet if he was not also such a brilliant technician; and a translator who wants to convey Tagore’s technical brilliance to the full has to command an equivalent range of techniques in his own language. 

Now for some of the other elements mentioned earlier. Of course all these elements overlap and interact; but for the purposes of analysis it is possible to distinguish them. 
 
 

1. Language 

Like all truly great poets, Tagore is able to incorporate into his diction the whole history of his language with its roots in Sanskrit, and also take the language forward with his many innovations. The translator of Tagore has to aspire to a similar depth and range in his own use of language.

 I am not myself a good classical linguist, whether in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. But my mother Betty Radice was a distinguished classical scholar and translator, and I must have acquired from her an early awareness of levels in the English language, from the classical through the poetic and romantic to the modern and colloquial. When I sense that Tagore is using richly classical words - and I particularly like those poems where he does - I try to use an equivalently classical (Latinate) vocabulary in English. Listen, for example, to part of Briksha-bandana (‘In Praise of Trees’, 1931), first in Bengali, then in my English translation.
 
 

                     he nistabdha, he mahagambhir, 
biryere bandhiya dhairye santirup dekhale saktir.
tai asi tomar asraye santidiksha labhibare,
sunite mauner mahabani; duscintar gurubhare,
natasirsha bilunthite syam-saumyacchayatale taba -
praner udar rup, ras-rup nitya naba naba,
bisvajayi bir-rup, dharanir banirup tar
labhite apan prane.

                     O profound, 
Silent tree, by restraining valour
With patience, you revealed creative
Power in its peaceful form. Thus we come
To your shade to learn the art of peace,
To hear the word of silence; weighed down 
With anxiety, we come to rest
In your tranquil blue-green shade, to take
Into our souls life rich, life ever
Juvenescent, life true to earth, life
Omni-victorious.

 At the other end of the spectrum there is the use by Tagore, especially in his gadya-kabita (vers libre), of the vocabulary and idioms of ordinary Bengali speech. A translator has to be alert to these too. Recently I read my translation of Phanki (‘Deception’, 1918) to an audience in London, and was pleased to find how natural and easy it was to read. I did not find it difficult to inject the right tones of humour and rapture and pathos into the reading, because the inflexions of Bengali seemed to have entered my English - despite all the cultural differences. Here is the young wife Binu, who is incurably ill, responding with delight to everything she sees when her husband takes her away from the city by train for a change of air:
 
 

     At Bilaspur station we had to change trains;
                We got down hurriedly.
Six hours to fill in the waiting-room:
     They seemed an age to me.
           But Binu said, ‘Why? It’s good to wait.’
     There seemed no limit to her delight.
           The journey was a flute that made her want to dance:
                Waiting, moving were made one by her happiness.
                     She opened the door of the waiting-room and said,
           ‘Look, look at those horse-carts passing -
     And can you see? That calf over there, how shiny and plump it is,
                What deep love in its mother’s eyes!
          And next to that steep-sided pond over there,
    That little fenced-in house under sisu-trees,
                     Near the railway-line,
Is it the station-master’s? What a lovely place to live.’

                   … ‘dekho dekho, ekkagari keman cale.
ar dekhecho? - bachurti oi, a mare yai, cikan nadhar deha,
                mayer cokhe ki sugabhir sneha!…’

2. Feeling

 Let us consider one of his simplest, most celebrated poems, one that even now most Bengali schoolchildren learn by heart: Tal-gach (‘Palm-tree’, 1922). Here it is in my translation.
 
 

Palm-tree:      single-legged giant,
                        topping the other trees,
                               peering at the firmament -
It longs            to pierce the black cloud-ceiling
                        and fly away, away,
                                if only it had wings.

The tree          seems to express its wish             
                         in the tossing of its head:
                                its fronds heave and swish -
It thinks,           Maybe my leaves are feathers, 
                         and nothing stops me now
                                from rising on their flutter.

All day              the fronds on the windblown tree
                         soar and flap and shudder
                                as though it thinks it can fly,
As though        it wanders in the skies,
                         travelling who knows where,
                                wheeling past the stars -

And then           as soon as the wind dies down,
                          the fronds subside, subside:
                                the mind of the tree returns 
To earth,           recalls that earth is its mother:
                          and then it likes once more
                                its earthly corner.

You may think that the poem originates essentially in a visual image, that of a palm-tree fluttering in the breeze. Yet Tagore’s imagery is never purely visual: indeed

The Post Office tr. by William Radice, and set as a play-within-a-play by Jill Parvin (The Tagore Centre, UK, 1996)

I do not think of him as a particularly visual poet. The fons et origo of this poem is the rupa-bheda or ‘emotional idea’ of a tree as a child, wanting to escape the earth, fly into the sky, into the realm of the imagination; but then wanting to stay with its earth-mother after all, for the love and security she offers. The feeling in the poem is the same as is found in Amal in The Post Office: the same poignancy too, as the palm-tree cannot actually leave the earth, any more than the mortally ill Amal can leave his home. The poem’s feeling is then uniquely expressed in its language, rhythm and structure. I always feel that in verses 2 and 3 the poem goes further and further - it’s hard to say where the exact climax is, because the palm-tree cannot reach what it aspires to. Sometimes an artist is at his greatest in his simplest productions, just as Schumann was at his greatest in the little piano piece called Träumerei (‘Dreaming’ - how ‘Palm-tree’ reminds me of that!), or Chopin could be at his greatest in a simple Mazurka. I love Tagore’s more elaborate poems, but I sense his greatness just as strongly in a poem like this, because its quality of feeling is so strong and true. 

3. Moral depth

Take Pakshi-manab, which I earlier quoted for its verse-form in my translation, and which now I should like to read to you complete.
 

Satanic machine, you enable man to fly.
       Land and sea had fallen to his power: 
              All that was left was the sky. 

God has given as gift a bird’s two wings.
       From the flash of feathery line and colour
              Spiritual joy springs.

Birds are companions to the clouds: blue space
      And great winds and brightly-coloured birds
              Are all of the same race.

The rhythms in the life and play of birds belong
      To the wind; from the sky’s music comes
              Their energy and song.

Thus each dawn throughout the forests of the earth
      Light, when it wakes, unites with birdsong
              In one harmonious birth.

In the great peace beneath the immense sky,
      The dancing waves of birds quiver
              Like wavelets rippling by.

Age after age through birds the life-spirit speaks:
      It is carried by birds along tracks of air
              To far-flung forests and peaks.

Today what do we see? And what is its meaning?
      The banner of arrogance has taken wing,
             Proud and overweening.

This thing has not been blessed by the life-divinity.
      The sun disowns it, neither does the moon
            Feel any affinity.

In the brutal roaring of an aeroplane we hear
      Incompatibility with sky,
           Destruction of atmosphere.

High among the clouds, in the heavens, its din
      Adds new blasphemous grating laughter
           To man’s catalogue of sin.

I feel the age we live in is drawing to a close -
      Upheavals threaten, gather the pace
            Of a storm that nothing slows.

Hatred and envy swell to violent conflagration:
      Panic spreads down from the skies,
            From their growing devastation.

If nowhere in the sky there is left a space
      For gods to be seated, then, Indra,
            Thunderer, may you place

At the end of this history your direst instruction:
      A last full stop written in the fire
            Of furious total destruction.

Hear the prayer of an earth that is stricken with pain:
      In the green woods, O may the birds
            Sing supreme again.

In a humbler way, I gave voice to the same anxieties in a little poem of my own, published in The Retreat (University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1995). Quite possibly Tagore’s poem, which I had translated ten years earlier, lay behind it:
 
 

I’m painting a fence, 
Listening to a bird. 
Plane flies over: 
Bird can’t be heard. 

If all the planes in the world 
Shared the same space, 
And all the birds in the world 
Were in the same place, 

Which would be louder? 
The singing or the roar?
It should be the birds, 
But I’m not quite sure. 

4. Wit 

I myself have only gradually discovered the wit of Tagore’s writing, and it may show more in Particles, Jottings, Sparks - especially Particles (Kanika) - than in Selected Poems. But wit can be found in that volume too. Think of the sparrow in The Sick-bed 6 (1940):

O my day-break sparrow - 
In my last moments of sleepiness,
While there is still some darkness,
Here you are tapping on the window-pane,
Asking for news
And then dancing and twittering
Just as your whim takes you.
Your pluckily bobbing tail
Cocks a snook at all restrictions.
When magpie-robins chirrup at dawn,
Poets tip them.
When a hidden koel-bird hoots all day
Its same unvarying fifth,
So high is its rating
It gets the applause of Kalidasa
Ahead of all other birds.
You couldn’t care less -
You never keep to the scale -
To enter Kalidasa’s room
And chatter
And mess up his metres
Amuses you greatly….*