I was pleasantly surprised when my wife announced that there has been a “new translation” of Tagore. For those who aren’t familiar with the name, Rabindranath Tagore (the most accurate transliteration of his Bengali name in the Latin script with English phonetics should be Robindronath Thakur, but I stick to the conventional spelling reflecting an Anglicized pronunciation) was a Bengali polymath who lived in colonial India - a highly versatile poet, playwright, lyricist, music composer, novelist, philosopher, political thinker, painter and education reformer, he is the biggest cultural icon for the almost 300 million Bengali people. His music and literature revolutionarlized Bengali culture for generations that followed and contributed deeply in creating the Bengali identity. He is the national poet of the Republic of India and the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India were written by him. Incidentally, in 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for a collection of lyrical poems titled “Gitanjali” (Song-Offerings), which he himself had translated to English, from their original Bengali. He also happens to be the first Asian, and the first non-White person to win the prize in any discipline.
Inspite of his versatility as a writer, his creative genius and the sheer enormity of his works (his complete works span an impressive 18 hardcover volumes), and inspite of his international acclaim, at present he is not as well known outside the Bengali-speaking world, and especially in the West. An obvious factor is the inevitable issue of translation, as no English translation could do justice to the richness of Tagore’s lyrical Bengali. Furthermore, from the very beginning, Tagore was misunderstood in the West. As Amartya Sen, another Bengali intellectual (and also a Nobel Laureate) explains, Tagore's admirers in the West portrayed him solely as a mystical religious figure, ignoring the rich ambiguity in Tagore's work, which balanced love for humanity and God, and emphasized on rationalism. In Europe, Tagore was perceived as a sage with a solution to the discontent plaguing the continent, whereas in his homeland, he was seen as a multifaceted creative artist and rational thinker. This marked a significant disconnect between Tagore's Western and Indian receptions.
The fascination with the “mystical sage” soon made way to disillusionment, in Amartya Sen’s words:
“... the real Tagore, got very little attention from his Western audience—neither from his sponsors nor from his detractors. Bertrand Russell wrote (in letters to Nimai Chatterji in the 1960s) that he did not like Tagore’s “mystic air,” with an inclination to spout “vague nonsense,” adding that the “sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately does not, in fact, mean anything at all.” When an otherwise sympathetic writer, George Bernard Shaw, transformed Rabindranath Tagore into a fictional character called “Stupendranath Beggor,” there was no longer much hope that Tagore’s reasoned ideas would receive the careful and serious attention that they deserved.”
As a Bengali deeply imbibed in my culture and as an ardent lover of Tagore’s literature, I have always felt that the rest of the world has a lot to receive from this versatile genius, if only the obstacles of language, distance and the orinetalist gaze could be overcome. Therefore, I was excited to learn that a “new” translation has been published. Which of his 40-odd books of poetry were translated to English this time, I asked. Who was the translator, I was curious, a Bengali, or a Western author who had taken the pain to learn Bengali, in order to capture the true beauty of Tagore’s creations?
The answers to both these questions left me shocked. It turned out that an American poet, Coleman Barks, has simply “re-written” the poems from Tagore’s English verses of the Gitanjali, without having any access to the original Bengali, as he does not read or speak Bengali. Nor did he seem to have received any close collaboration with a Bengali speaker in the process. The cover of the book, titled “What Wants to Come Through Me Now”, however, still presents itself as a “new translation/ version” by the American poet.
Any Bengali person who has read both the English and Bengali collection of poems featuring in the Gitanjali would agree that the English versions are stripped of much of their original brilliance, partly due to the inherent limitations in translation, partly because of the psalm-like heavy English Tagore chose, and partly because of Tagore’s deliberate adaptation of those poems for a Western audience. As the editors of “The Essential Tagore” a recently published anthology of Tagore’s works published recently by the Harvard University Press point out,
(Tagore himself) “was not very confident about his own command of English and far from complacent about English translations of his work. He also tried to make his works accessible to readers in the West by toning down the Indianness of his works. ”
As an aside, the above is a well-done collection that includes some of Tagore’s own English writings as well as translations by an eclectic group of authors, all of whom translated the writings directly from Bengali. The translation of some of his poems by the Oxford-based bilingual poet Ketaki Kushari Dyson is also noteworthy.
Anyone familiar with Tagore’s Bengali work, would admit that bringing forth the true beauty of Tagore’s Bengali poems to an English speaking audience is simultaneously important and extremely challenging. How someone, with zero knowledge of Bengali could overcome those challenges, or how one could in fact “translate” something without having any access to the original (since they do not know the source language) is puzzling. At best, this is a re-interpretation of Tagore’s poems in simpler English, or, if we must use the word “translation”, a translation from English to English. As such, while it can render the undeniably heavy language used by Tagore to a more colloquial English, it cannot in anyway bring the reader closer to the magnificence of the original Bengali.
Of course, any poet, can interpret another poet’s works in whatever way they feel inspired, and I do not doubt that Coleman Barks, who, in his own words, attempted to “rephrase his insights in language that does not cloud their brilliance”, has produced verses that are indeed more lucid and simpler than Tagore’s biblical English. As a literary exercise by a poet, that is an interesting endeavour. However, when the same exercise is presented as a new translation, and pretends to re-introduce Tagore to the West, this becomes deeply problematic.
As I read the description of the book, I also realized that Mr Barks has followed the footsteps of Yeats and Pound in “re-introducing” Tagore as “one of the great universal mystics”. It is disappointing that such a reductionist view of the versatile maestro would continue to be presented and entertained in the Anglo-American circle despite decades of both scholarly and literary work in English that should have presented ample opportunity to demystify Tagore, and appreciate his multifaceted contributions. Sadly, Mr Barks chose instead to continue the same orientalist perspective that has obfuscated Western perceptions of the East through centuries.
But to me the biggest issue with this purported “translation” is the complete exclusion of Bengali voices from the presentation of the book. Not only do millions of educated Bengalis learn Tagore’s songs and poems at a very early age, many of us literally live by them. Many Bengalis would admit how Tagore’s songs connect profoundly with our emotions in both joy and the depths of sorrow. To an outsider, it’s difficult to explain what Tagore means to Bengalis — few other people have such deep adoration for a poet. Nor are Bengalis an alien, inaccessible lot, there are more than a million Bengalis in the English-speaking world, many of whom are extremely well-versed in both Bengali and English. And yet here they are uninvited in conversations around their most precious treasures.
The above could have been palatable even if the people presenting Barks’ version were at least somewhat familiar with Tagore. Alas, that too is not the case – the publisher’s own website, for instance, quotes one Elizabeth Burns, President Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College, as saying
“This is what Coleman Barks has just done in his reinterpretation for English-speaking audiences of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. In the elegant poems we have been taught to love in his versions of Rumi, Barks now makes available to all of us Gitanjali of Tagore, a crowning achievement of Hindi Bengali literature. With it he has opened for us the treasures of Hindi spirituality and given new and personal meaning to diversity for the 21st century.”
Note the use of the word “Hindi” here. This is akin to describing Federico García Lorca as a French poet, or Victor Hugo’s works as a crowning achievement of Anglo-French literature. Tagore was not a Hindi poet and wrote nothing in Hindi, and his Gitanjali has nothing to do with “Hindi spirituality”, whatever that may mean.
The fact that the Anglo-American publisher could audaciously ignore the Bengaliness of Tagore, and appropriate the greatest icon of a people, and strip him of his versatility, is ultimately linked to the privileged position that the West, and especially the English speaking circles in the West, enjoy in a world that still remains culturally colonized. Coleman Barks himself is not new to this, his “translations” of Rumi, too, were rendered boldly without any knowledge of either Persian or Islamic theology, and has been called out for de-Islamizing Rumi and Sufism to the international audience. And yet, thanks to that same privilege, these still happen to be most well-known internationally, out of several, more authentic versions. For products of South Asian culture, Tagore’s reconstruction through Barks, joins a long list of colonial appropriations, some of the foremost of which are Tantra and Yoga.
Who gets to represent something at a global stage? Those who come with a deep personal connection to the culture that it comes from, and have access to it in its most unadulterated form, or those only superficially familiar with it, but who, by means of their privilege, have far greater clout and reach? Those of us who dream of decolonizing the literary world need to have an unambiguous answer to this question.
