Each time I read Gitanjali, and I read it first in my teens, I found myself stumbling over the same few things: the language was occasionally clunky; the use of “thee” and “thou didst” and similar were discordant with the intimacy of the relationships portrayed in the poem; thematically, the poems were jumbled; and some poems simply didn’t seem to belong, either because they were thematically incongruous or because they were redundant or because—and this I would hardly dare to admit even to myself—they just weren’t very good.
Tagore wrote Gitanjali in Bengali, in 1910, translating it into English three years later. But his translation was problematic: the English version contained many but not all the poems from the Bengali original; the translations themselves were not always true either literally or in spirit; and there were poems in the English Gitanjali that came not from the Bengali Gitanjali but from other parts of Tagore’s immense oeuvre.
Tagore did not have the benefit of an editor. Neither did he have a collaborator, or a sounding board. Who could read his work and say, “Actually, this line is a bit awkward,” or “This poem doesn’t contribute anything to the set”? If Tagore had had such a person, how might Gitanjali be different? And who has written a solid critical analysis of Gitanjali, assessing it solely as a work of literature, and refraining from previously established adoration of Tagore himself? No one. Not even Yeats, who wrote the introduction to the English poems.
Tagore wrote, and his words were devoured. When he produced an English version of Gitanjali, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote the foreword and, I think, provided some small amount of editorial feedback to Tagore, but nothing substantial. I think also—and I have to confirm this—that Tagore wasn’t in fact the best, most conscientious, or most consistent translator. And perhaps all this goes to account for why the English Gitanjali makes for slightly bumpy reading.
Still, who was I—in my teens, and unable to actually read Bengali—to criticize Tagore? But years passed; I read more poetry from all over the world; I studied literature and analysis; and still, each time that I re-read Gitanjali, I had the same thoughts. Finally, I decided that, just for myself, in the total privacy of my own personal world, I would rework Gitanjali so that I had a version that retained all the beauty, intimacy and soul of Tagore’s poetry, but was smoothed and free of the errors that pricked at me and diminished my pleasure when I read the original. That is what I am undertaking here.
Gitanjali means “song offerings.” Geet is song. Anjali means offering, in the context of “an offering to God,” and I capitalize “God” because that is what it means. Not “god.” The poems are lyrical, mystical, playful, intimate, ecstatic, transcendent. Not all of them are outstanding; some are only okay. But some are breathtaking. The language, though, is a hundred years old. (Context: the foreword to the collection is written by W. B. Yeats, a contemporary.) The aesthetic was a little different back then, y’know? The use of “thee” and “thou” and such are, I feel, a real distraction from the simplicity and intimacy of the poems. When the narrator describes himself (or herself?) as a beloved waiting, distracted from the world, for her lover, and really is talking about the relationship between human and god, the use of thee/thy/thou feels ponderous, formal and distancing, when the conceit of the poem reveals deep intimacy. God and human as lover and beloved!
What if we took these poems and updated them? What if we polished them very slightly? What if we let the language flow with the ease we find in contemporary English-language poets like Billy Collins or Kay Ryan? Not for Tagore the tortured over-intellectualization of, say, Eliot (much as I enjoy The Wasteland, I roll my eyes a little every time). Not for the Tagore the navel-gazing of Wordsworth. No; he is closer, in these poems, to the likes of poets like Rumi (I always want to put an asterisk there, because Rumi’s work, in the form that we have it, is complicated) or the work like The Prophet (another troubled/troubling work–all these troubles we can put aside for now by invoking the fallacy of authorial intention and by standing staunchly by the notion that every work has an event horizon).
Does Gitanjali need translation or updating? For starters, Tagore translated his own poetry from Bengali to English, and perhaps he knew what he was doing. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether he knew what he was doing; perhaps it’s enough that this is what he produced. And we don’t go about “translating” Shakespeare into contemporary English, do we? We do that with Beowulf and with Chaucer, though; we relent and allow that the language has changed so much since then that reading those in the original would not be English as we know it now. So where do we draw our lines?
There is joy in reading Beowulf in the original, Chaucer in the original, Shakespeare in the original. I think also that there is something illuminating when we have a masterly translation or updating. Seamus Heaney did this for Beowulf. (The brilliance of the whole thing is contained in that very first word: he translated the Anglo-Saxon Hwaet! as “So.” Lovely, lovely, lovely.) And Coleman Barks (though I think he goes unconscionably far, losing credibility especially when he introduces the occasional anachronistic detail or turn of phrase) breathes a life into Rumi that many scholarly translators were unable to; he seizes, joyfully, the spirit of Rumi, recognizes in it a voice that resonates with his own, and enters into a sort of collaboration, never mind that Rumi lived something like a thousand years before Barks. And there is Gibran, with his American patron Mary Haskell, the woman who, some suspect, had much more to contribute to The Prophet than we realize (details buried here). Does it matter who wrote it and to what extent? Perhaps only if we are studying authorship. But if all we want is spirit, the spirit of the work itself, then does it matter? Perhaps not.
Now: I do not presume to put myself in the place of Haskell, or Barks, or (good heavens) Heaney. But I think it is not unreasonable for me to feel the spirit of Gitanjali and make a small offering myself: to be the Ezra Pound to Tagore’s Hemingway (I laugh at myself; don’t worry); to be the editor that Tagore didn’t have.
I begin to feel bogged down when I think about what will people say, and how can I justify this. But what if I don’t think about those things? What if I translate as if no one would ever know what I was doing, to create for myself a version of Gitanjali that is unfettered by language? Part of my motivation (and this is where the chutzpah is) comes from my editorial instincts: thinking that Tagore made a mistake when he selected a particular register in the English poems, and wanting to correct that. And part of my motivation comes simply from my deep love of literature, particularly poetry: I want to free these poems and let them be the intimate, ecstatic breathings-out that they want to be. And so, lovely world, here we are; hello.
thegitanjaliproject.com 