Changing the words themselves

There are three broad categories of change that I am making: the arrangement of the lines of words, the words themselves within an individual poem, and the deletion of certain poems. The first I explained here. Now we come to a knottier bit: the words themselves.

This project grew out of my—let us say feeling—feeling that the use of “thee,” “thy,” “thou didst” and similar were just plain wrong: they were discordant with everything else about the poems. So I started by simply changing all of these to the more intimate “you,” “your” and so forth. For instance, take the opening line from Poem #1:

Original
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.

Revised
You have made me endless: such is your pleasure.

Sometimes that necessitated minor changes in other words. For instance, “thou didst give” would become “you gave.” But as I worked through the poems, I found other words and phrases that felt tortured, awkward, bloated, redundant or otherwise out of place. Here is an example from Poem #3:

Original
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.

Revised
Your music lights the world;
its breath runs from sky to sky;
its holy stream breaks through stone and rushes on.

There is difficulty in balancing the sound of the original (complete with clunkiness) against what I think the poems want to be, and I have to be careful not to let my personal aesthetic preferences bias my editorial work. But this difficulty exists in all editorial work, and there must exist trust between an author and an editor–a complicated thing when one party is long deceased.

Different editors would produce different final works out of the same draft. Some authors’ works I would not try to revise: I’m reading Adrienne Rich right now, and I don’t feel confident that I would be able to be her editor in this way, because I don’t yet have an intuitive feel for her voice, her style. But I think that I understand Tagore’s voice and style, and so I feel confident in making changes to specific words.