English poetic influence on Tagore seduced Edward Thompson into seeing him as an essentially nineteenth-century poet, a coeval of Tennyson and Swinburne; and Thompson’s translations certainly made him seem like that. But this is wrong. Although Tagore started in the nineteenth century, he became a Modern, never detaching his poetry from the times in which he lived, always striving to extend his range and break literary conventions. This was an aspect of the continual progress in him that I have already described.
But there is an important difference between Tagore and the major Moderns of Europe. Joyce, Pound, Stravinsky, Picasso – all have built on Romanticism but at the same time tried to break it up. Subsequent generations of artists have cut their links with it completely. Tagore, however, carried his romanticism intact into the modern world, used it as a sceptre and a torch. Thus to children of the neo-Romanticism of the 1960s, my own era, he is a sympathetic voice. His educational ideals, his anti-materialism, his feminism, his version of the spiritual are all, to my own generation, familiar. In these he is near.
Tagore’s idealism sets him apart: it also makes him human. The way to read Tagore is emphatically not to sit at his feet, to look to him for wisdom. This is the mistake his contemporary admirers made: it did him no good, made fools of them, and could not last. The way to read Tagore is to see limitations in his faith, vulnerability in his striving. Tagore’s whole career as a writer was a progress towards greater and greater honesty. His late poems, most of them put straight down with no metre, no rhyme, no deliberate artifice, should not be read as progress towards greater and greater enlightenment, mukti, spiritual fulfilment: read in that way – as wisdom instead of poetry – they will seem feeble and insipid. They are rather an ever more naked self-exposure. A poem such as ‘Recovery – 14’, about a pet dog, restates Tagore’s Religion of Man: read as such, it will carry no more conviction than the words of an Anglican hymn. Rather, one should sense its implicit suggestion: ‘Here I am, a vulnerable and ignorant human being. Here are the beliefs and values on which I have based my life: you can take them or leave them as you please.’ If we read it in this way, it becomes moving. Its wisdom is in its ignorance.
Tagore’s late poetry becomes less and less poetry, more and more an unadorned human voice. To hear that voice we need to know the man, and that is not easy. There are readable biographies of Tagore, but they do not really break through to the human being in him. There is a nervousness about entering the sanctum, discovering the feet of clay. But I have no doubt that the better we can understand him as a man, the more clearly his very last poems will speak to us.
It is because I do not yet know Tagore well enough that I have not felt able to translate anything from his very last book, śes lekhā (Last Writings), or provide the commentary that would be required, the long history in his life and experience of every thought and line of its fifteen short poems. Or perhaps in any case they are untranslatable. Only in its own language can the voice be entirely itself. In the bewilderment, bafflement and incomprehension of his very last poems, Tagore comes nearest to us all; but language keeps him far.
He is within all
Tagore was not the only creative talent in his large family. Debendranath’s eldest son Dwijendranath was an eccentric genius, author of a long Bengali poem modelled on the Faerie Queene, inventor of shorthand in Bengali (with a manual on it in verse!) and a gifted mathematician; his second son Satyendranath was a scholar as well as the first Indian member of the Indian Civil Service, translating Sanskrit classics and Marathi poetry; his fifth son Jyotirindranath was an accomplished artist in many fields, music especially, and he had a great influence on the education and development of Tagore, who was thirteen years his junior (Jyotirindranath’s wife Kadambari was only a little older than Tagore, and they were particularly close: speculation never ceases about her tragic suicide four months after his marriage in 1883). The family was large and talented enough to provide its own cultural fare, and some of Tagore’s earliest creations were musical plays performed within the family circle. There was bālmīki pratibhā (The Genius of Vālmīki), for example, which cribbed some tunes from Moore’s Irish Melodies, heard by Tagore on his first visit to England in 1878–80.
This amateur dramatic spirit stayed with Tagore all his life: his later plays, operas and ballets were always performed first by staff and students at Santiniketan (often with Tagore himself taking a part), not on the professional Calcutta stage. I find it useful, when considering Tagore’s concept of Personality, to keep his dramatic work in mind. All his work was governed and unified by his own personality: it was as though he was the producer of a complex play lasting his whole life, bringing on different actors, sets, dances (the different genres he cultivated) as he felt inclined. It was a drama that he produced, created – yet remained outside, just as he used to sit on stage during performances of the ballets that he took round India in 1934–6, watching but not participating. In this image we have the paradox of his jīban-debatā: his sense on the one hand that his works were endlessly diverse, but on the other hand that they were all part of a unified play; that he was creatively free, always at liberty to try new things, but on the other hand at the mercy of a life-deity, a personality higher than his own, guiding him from outside. The jiban-debatā concept accounted for his dual sense of involvement in and detachment from his own creations. That same paradox he felt to be at the heart of the Universe itself; so his own creative personality was but a microcosm of the universal Personality, who was also simultaneously detached and involved; and the diversity and extravagance of his art was but a reflection of the extravagance of Nature itself.
Right from the moment that I conceived this book, I felt that Tagore’s concept of jīban-debatā would have to direct it. A selection of Tagore’s poems could never be done by committee, by trying to decide objectively which were the best or most representative. It would have to start from a vision of unity, and the choice of poems would have to be governed by the laws defining that unity. The structure of the book I therefore conceived in three parts; and these – though I did not at first realize it – would be first the poems up to the Nobel Prize in 1913; then the poems written during his years of travel and world fame; then the poems written after his illness of September 1937, when he could no longer travel. The divisions were unequal in terms of years; a little more equal in terms of books of verse (Tagore produced eleven books in his last four years). But they have a logic to them. With the three-part division established, there would have to be internal principles of selection. These were intuitive, and I find them hard to define, but the most important were contrast, balance, novelty, rhythm. Contrast is the easiest: there would have to be contrasts from one poem to the next, representing the diversity in Tagore. Balance is more difficult: the poems cannot all be entirely different from each other – there will be some that echo others, and the placing of these pairs or trios creates balance. Sometimes, searching for the next poem to translate, I would reject one because it was too near or too far from one that it echoed. Novelty was the criterion that prevented too great a similarity between any two poems: having translated one, I could not do another that was too like it – the selection had to move on, move on, with new forms, new subjects all the time, to be true to the spirit of perpetual progress in Tagore. But it had at the same time to have a cohesiveness that was more than its overall structure or its balance in selection. There had, through all the different types of poem and varieties of verse-form, to be a unity of rhythm.
Rhythm in this sense is impossible to describe. Tagore often referred to the underlying harmony of things in terms of rhythm: he was in no doubt that the rhythms of art – whether musical rhythms, metrical rhythms, structural rhythms or even the rhythm of line and shape that he explored in his paintings – were a reflection of rhythms in Nature and the universe which science could analyse but never communicate. So essential is rhythm to his aesthetic philosophy that I never considered anything other than a verse transla
tion of his poems; for all the agonies and compromises that verse translation imposes, no prose translation could begin to approach Tagore.
But the rhythm we are concerned with is not just universal rhythm: it is the rhythm of Tagore’s own individuality, his own personal way of feeling and thinking. Every major artist has his own unique rhythm: it is one of the things that distinguish the major artist from the second-rate. I have tried – I cannot judge whether I have succeeded – to achieve a unity of rhythm in these translations. They are meant to be read aloud. If anyone does so, I hope that he or she will find that there is a connecting and unifying rhythm running through them all. It may not be Tagore’s rhythm – how can it be, completely, in another language? But if rhythm is there at all, then I shall have achieved something.
He is outside all
On 24 August 1930, Tagore wrote from Geneva to William Rothenstein, who had been his regular correspondent since 1912. The wry, self-mocking tone of the letter is typical of Tagore’s epistolary style; but it also contains a most revealing antithesis:
Very dear friend
To be reconciled to the inevitable with good grace is wisdom, so let me in a spirit of resignation accept the fact that you must have an undisturbed opportunity to produce your pictures while I nourish a desperate hope in my mind to find some rest somewhere in the closely-knit days which hold me captive – and to play truant to all obligations that are compulsory. The rich luxury of leisure is not for me while I am in Europe – I am doomed to be unrelentingly good to humanity and remain harnessed to a cause. The artist in me ever urges me to be naughty and natural – but it requires [a] good deal of courage to be what I truly am. Then again I do not really know myself and dare not play tricks with my nature. So the good for nothing artist must have for his bed-fellow the man of a hundred good intentions.
In Germany my pictures have found a very warm welcome which was far beyond my expectations. Five of them have got their permanent place in [the] Berlin National Gallery, and several invitations have come from other centres for their exhibition. This has a strange analogy with the time which followed the Gitanjali publication – it is sudden and boisterous like a hill stream after a storm and like the same casual flood may disappear with the same emphasis of suddenness. With love
Ever yours
Rabindranath Tagore
In this Introduction I have often identified the ‘he’ of my quotation from the āśā Upanisad with Tagore himself – a sleight of hand that may arouse suspicions about my personal attitude to Tagore, but which is not, however, at odds with his philosophy or with Indian philosophical tradition generally, which has frequently striven to identify God with man, Brahman with Ätman (soul). But in this final section the sage’s intended meaning must stand. It is that God exists outside his creation; in that sense, to those who are part of his creation, he is unreachable.
I have already spoken of Tagore’s sense of the ‘farness’ of his ideal: but that is a feeling that goes hand in hand with his sense of its nearness in the real, observable and perceptible beauty of Nature, human love and children. I am now concerned with something rather different: the feeling that Nature and human creativity lie essentially outside and separate from God; that the Goodness, the Beauty and the Harmony of God may have nothing to do with the autonomous processes of Nature, and that therefore the artist’s creativity is likewise amoral, arbitrary, fanciful, whimsical, unreal. This is the suspicion that Tagore voices in his letter to Rothenstein: that the true, natural artist in him was ‘naughty’, ‘good for nothing’, essentially separate from the idealist and moralist in him, ‘the man of a hundred good intentions’. I have quoted the whole letter, because it was in the paintings that the naughty artist in Tagore was indeed freest, unimpeded and unrestrained by his equally strong moral impulse. This is why the paintings – nearly three thousand of them – are such a puzzle to so many. They are hit-and-miss, amateurish in their technique – but that is not the trouble, for Tagore glorified amateurism in many fields. It is rather their apparent impishness, their revelry in the odd, the grotesque, the meaningless. What have they to do with the author of Gitanjali or The Religion of Man?
The element in Tagore that found its clearest and most unfettered expression in his paintings was always present in him: it accounts for the equivocal tones in his writing, some of which I have tried to define in my notes to the poems. Tagore’s ideal of beauty can be equivocal: in the imagery of the heavenly city of Alakā, taken from Kālidāsa, the poet whom he admired more than any other, with its birahiī (separated Beloved) condemned to immortality, there is sterility – its very perfection is inhuman and therefore alien. The jīban-debatā can be equivocal too: all too often it is udāsīn, detached, indifferent to human feeling and concern – Tagore expressed the pain of rejection by an indifferent jīban-debatā in countless songs. Nature itself, for all its beauties, can seem udāsīn as well: poems such as ‘Earth’ and ‘In the Eyes of a Peacock’ present a picture of natural processes aloof from human concerns. Above all Tagore’s notion of khelā, the endless playfulness of the universe, is equivocal: though it is a source of joy, and is revealed to us in the play of young children, it also has a dark side; it is the vanity and meaninglessness of life, it is māyā, the illusion and ignorance to which – according to the cruellest strain in Indian religion and philosophy – we are all, as mortal creatures, perpetually condemned, perpetually cut off as we are from the reality of God, the ideal, the infinite, the eternal.
If the processes of Nature and Art are separate from God, cannot God be dropped from the picture altogether? Should Goodness, Harmony, Unity be dismissed as fictions? I do not know enough to say whether these questions were in Tagore’s mind at the end of his life, while the world collapsed into war; but some of his last works seem to hint at them. When I finished my translations, at Santiniketan in the spring of 1982, I chose to stop with a poem in which the naughty artist, rather than the idealist or the moralist, is to the fore. It is an exuberant poem, not I think one that sees no structure at all in the stuff of reality but one which strives, like many works of modern art, to pierce through to a deeper structure that the ordering of our rational mind obscures. But in its vision of language abandoning itself, it comes perilously and awesomely close to acceptance of a complete lack of meaning or purpose in the universe: to suspicion that, though there may be laws or rules governing Nature or the mind of man, their status may be as frivolous and arbitrary as the rules of a game; that the whole stupendous structure may rest on a bleak whimsicality. It comes close… but I think it stops short. We are brought, as it were, to the edge of a gulf that Tagore could never quite open. He went furthest in his paintings; but in his writing his ‘courage to be what I truly am’ generally failed him. Had it succeeded, there would have been no poetry, and no song. For though Tagore’s Art was sometimes inhibited by his moral and spiritual ideals, it could never have been perfected without them. Poetry is impossible without Love: that is what I hope will emerge more strongly than anything else from the poems that follow.
Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
(W. B. Yeats)
1882–1913
Brahmā, Visnu, Śiva
In a worldless timeless lightless great emptiness
Four-faced Brahmā broods.
Of a sudden a sea of joy surges through his heart –
The ur-god opens his eyes.
5
Speech from four mouths
Speeds to each quarter.
Through infinite dark,
Through limitless sky,
Like a growing sea-storm,
10
Like hope never sated,
His Word starts to move.
Stirred by joy, his breathing quickens,
His eight eyes quiver with flame.
His fire-matted h
air sweeps the horizon,
15
Bright as a million suns.
From the towering source of the world
In a thousand streams
Cascades the primeval blazing fountain,
Fragmenting silence,
20
Splitting its stone heart.
In a universe rampant
With new life exhalant,
With new life exultant,
In a borderless sky
25
Visnu spreads wide
His four-handed blessing.
He raises his conch
And all things quake