Note

‘The Nobel Laurel’
A B writes

Sisir K Majumdar's article ‘Nobel Laurel : The Centenary’ (Autumn Number, 2012) contains useful information. But it seems to miss one important issue, namely Tagore's eclipse in the West. Any serious reader of Tagore, who has at the same time a fair degree of acquaintance with world literature, must acknowledge Tagore’s greatness as a writer. Of course, he had detractors in his lifetime, and was sometimes attacked with undisguised scurrility. Tagore himself was not always capable of treating them with cool disdain. The verdict of history has, however, gone against these detractors. A fact, however, remains. As Majumdar rightly observes, the English translations of the poems of Gitanjail created a great sensation when they were first launched into the literary world of Britain, finally leading to the award of the Nobel Prize. But it is also true that this fame was short-lived, and Tagore's eclipse in the West is a phenomenon acknowledged by many including Nirad C Chaudhuri and Amartya Sen. The reason is not difficult to understand. Tagore's literary reputation rested mainly on his greatness as a poet, and poetry is notoriously difficult to translate. Those who have studied the English renderings of Tagore’s poems with some degree of seriousness will not perhaps have much reason to disagree with Nirad C Chaudhuri’s comment, ‘‘He got the Nobel Prize on the strength of his own translations of a very small number of his poems belonging to a particular phase of his literary life. But they were no approach to the originals. The quality which was present in those never came through in the translations, which had a curious thinness, and that made them mere wraiths of the originals. The translations which followed, both by him and others, were worse, and no literary reputation could rest securely on them.’’ (Thy Hand, Great Anarch: Addision–Welesley, pp 596-597) One is justified in concluding that Tagore has not received his due recognition as a poet in the western world. A Nobel Prize does not endow anybody with lasting greatness. Then the question arises : why did the translations of the poems of Gitanjali create such a sensation as it did in the Western literary circles? It is quite possible that the messages contained within these poems appealed to a certain mood then prevalent among the western literary figures. Majumdar’s comment on W B Yeats seems to be a bit careless. It was indeed said in India as well as in England that W B Yeats had ‘rewritten’ Tagore’s translations of the poems of Gitanjali. But there is no evidence that Yeats himself ever made such a fanciful claim. He suggested changes here and there and probably many of them were incorporated. That Yeats indeed helped in the preparation of the final manuscript of Gitanjali is acknowledged by Professor Amartya Sen (Sen, The Argumentative Indian, p 97). After more than two decades, i.e, in 1935,Yeats expressed his dislike for the later translations made by Tagore of his own poems in a letter written to Rothenstein, ‘‘...Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. Nobody can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought.’’ The first sentence is certainly very much unfair, but the second contains a large measure of truth. Yet it is unlikely that better translations of Tagore's poetry, capable of reproducing the feelings and sentiments of the original in any foreign language, will emerge in the future.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 20, Nov 25-Dec 1, 2012

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