TONY K. STEWART is a Bengali language and area specialist whose research and teaching focus on the religious literatures of the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. Trained at The University of Chicago, his research on the Hindu Vaiṣṇava traditions of Bengal led him to specialize in the Brajabuli literary dialect of Bengali. Supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays program, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Institue of Bangladesh Studies, he has worked extensively on the transcription and translation of unpublished handwritten Bengali manuscripts housed in Kolkata, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently Stewart is Professor of South Asia religions at North Carolina State University, and Director of the North Carolina Center for South Asia Studies. He divides his time between Raleigh, Charleston, London, and Dhaka.
CHASE TWICHELL was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950. She is the author of five books of poetry, including The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, 1998), The Ghost of Eden (Ontario Review Press, 1995), and Perdido (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991). She has won awards from the Artists Foundation (Boston), the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999, Twichell quit teaching (at Princeton University) to start Ausable Press, which publishes contemporary poetry. She lives in Keene, New York, with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks.
Acknowledgments
These poems have appeared in the following publications. We are grateful to their editors:
Brick (Canada), Columbia Journal, The Drunken Boat, The
Electronic Poetry Review.
Translation Copyright 2003 by Tony K. Stewart and Chase Twichell
Introduction and postscript copyright 2003 by Tony K. Stewart
All rights reserved
Cover art: Untitled Kalighat painting, V&A Picture Library
Frontispiece: Signed photograph of Rabindranath Tagore, c. 1920, private collection of Tony K. Stewart
ISBN: 978-1-55659-196-9
eISBN: 978-1-61932-122-9
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Rabindranath Tagore, The Lover of God
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