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The Elusive Tagore

openthemagazine.com | Original Article | by Philip Nikolayev

Rabindranath Tagore, more than anyone else, represents Indian poetry to the rest of the world. He does so in an iconic, canonical sort of way, with works of Renaissance-like artistic versatility and with his stately good looks and air of gentle authority.

The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, friend to William Butler Yeats and interlocutor to Albert Einstein, Tagore helped strengthen the intellectual bridge between India’s civilisation and the West’s. Yet his poetry, which is admittedly his primary accomplishment, remains elusive in the English language.

As someone who does not know Bengali, I often wonder: why does Tagore seem so untranslatable? I must assume that he is terrific in the original. It is impossible to believe that he, who is held as the greatest Bengali poet of all time, could merely be mediocre, even if the English translations often make him seem so. Why then has he never been translated in a way that even hints at good poetry, let alone anything outstanding? Read More...