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Song Offerings

(Gitanjali)

Rabindranath Tagore

Translated by Joe Winter

No Text
Categories: 19th Century, BAME, Bengali, Indian, Translation
Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (208 pages)
(Pub. Jun 2000)
9780856463112
£9.95 £8.96
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    50

    God of the silent soul
          awake, alone,
    today I will open a door
                and be known.
           
    Whom do I seek all day
          in the swift outside?
    I will learn the holy word
                of eventide.

    I light the lamp of my life
          with your life’s light.
    O priest, in quiet I will make
                my gift tonight.

    Where the cosmos has taught
          a world to pray,
    I too of that radiance
                will hold a ray.

    Translated by Joe Winter

    The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 primarily for this work, parts of which he had rendered into the lucid, grave English prose of prayer. Although he wrote over 40 books of poetry, this is the only one whose name is known outside the subcontinent. Tagore’s most famous work deserves to be seen as it appeared in the Bengali – a series of jewels, the whole with the authority virtually of a holy book, and each one a metaphysical delight. Joe Winter’s complete translation, the first in English verse, emulates the grandeur and lightness of movement of these wonderful song-poems.

    Rabindranath Tagore
    Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) became the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of his own prose versions of his poems, greatly admired by W.B. Yeats. He was a Renaissance man – poet and writer of fiction, composer and artist and playwright, educationalist and ... read more
    Joe Winter
    Joe Winter, born in London in 1943, taught English in secondary schools in London from 1967 to 1994. He lived in Calcutta from 1994 to 2006 before returning to England. His Bengali translations include Das’s Naked Lonely Hand and Bengal the Beautiful, and Tagore’s Song Offerings (Gitanjali), Lipika (stories) ... read more
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