Gitanjali

Gitanjali is a collection of 103 English

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poems, largely translations, by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore.

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This volume became very famous in the West, and was widely translated.

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Gitanjali (গীতাঞ্জলি)

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is also the title of an earlier Bengali volume (1910)

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of mostly devotional songs.

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The word "gItAnjali" is a composed from "gIta", song, and "anjali", offering,

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and thus means - "An offering of songs"; but the word

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for offering, anjali, has a strong devotional connotation, so the title

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may also be interpreted as "prayer offering of song".

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The English collection is not a translation of poems from the Bengali volume

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of the same name. While

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half the poems (52 out of 103) in the English text were selected from the Bengali

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volume, others were taken from these works (given with year and

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number of songs selected for the English text):

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gItimAlya (1914,17), naivedya (1901,15), kheyA (1906,11) and a handful

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from other works. The translations were often radical, leaving out

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or altering large chunks of the poem and

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in one instance even fusing two separate poems (song 95, which unifies

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songs 89,90 of naivedya).

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The translations were undertaken prior to a visit to England in 1912,

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where the poems were extremely well received. A slender volume was published

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in 1913 with an exhilarating preface by WB Yeats, and in the same year,

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based on a corpus of three thin translations,

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Rabindranath became the first non-European to

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win the Nobel prize for literature.

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