Tagore’s Poetry in English Translation By Dr. Md. Abu Zafor

Tagore’s Poetry in English Translation By Dr. Md. Abu Zafor

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Rabindranath Tagore’s poems began to appear in English translation in the first decade of the twentieth century. Tagore’s self-translated Nobel winning Gitanjali: Song Offerings, which contains prose translations of a collection of 103 poems translated from his nine different Bengali works, was first published in 1912. Before 1912 the only published work that included some translations of Tagore’s poems is Echoes from East and West.1That Tagore himself played a significant role in translating his poems is well-known. For more than a decade he almost single-handedly translated his poems. Translations by other translators began to appear in print from 1922. The colonial phase of the 20th century (till 1947) produced at least twelve translated works from his Bengali poems, out of which six were by Tagore himself. Between 1948 and 2011 more.

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The Necessity of a Tagorean Philosophy by Dr. Md. Abu Zafor

The Necessity of a Tagorean Philosophy by Dr. Md. Abu Zafor

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Fakrul's Alam's Rabindranath Tagore and National Identity Formation in Bangladesh: Essays and Reviews is an excellent critical work on Tagore written in excellent English. Although the book is primarily meant for the non-Bengali reading public who want to know of Tagore's relevance to the world in general and Bangladesh in particular, it has special significance for Bangladeshi readers as well. The book demonstrates some aspects of Tagore's writings, especially his essays, lectures, speeches, letters, dialogues, etc, that were less or little explored before. The opening chapter is most important to understand the causes of an anti-Tagore sentiment among some sections of people in post colonial Bangladesh territory. Fakrul Alam shows how the Pakistani government tried to eliminate Tagore in a bid to destroy the Bengali speaking people's cultural heritage and make them impoverished as a language-based community. In the context of the Language Movement,  Alam states: 'Rabindranath is the architect of modern Bengali, he would inevitably become a key rallying point for the activists of the movement . Bids to eliminate him from East Pakistan's cultural history would only fuel the resistance to the Pakistani state.  In trying to minimize his presence in East Pakistan, the government of the country only succeeded in making East Bengalis realize that he was central to the formation of their distinctive identity.” Alam's essay, however, clarifies why an anti-Tagore sentiment among a section of people, who are mainly Islamists  or fundamentalists, continues to prevail more or less in independent Bangladesh though in reality Tagore 'was never a communal thinker and that he never sought wittingly to subvert or humiliate the Muslims.

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