Reviews

• 心に響く稀有な詩集。

  心に響く稀有な詩集だ。人生の折々に心から沸き起こって来る感情を、静かな、しかし力強い言葉で鮮やかに紡ぎ出した、時に辛く時に美しい詩の数々。読む度に人生の深淵に引き込まれてしまう。 森本達雄著・訳注の「ギタンジャリ」のレヴューにも書いたが、私がタゴールの詩に興味を持ったのは、E・キューブラー・ロスの「死ぬ瞬間（死とその過程について）」の各章の扉に、彼の作品集「果実採り」、「迷い鳥たち」、「とらえがたきもの」、そして「ギタンジャリ」からの一節が紹介されているのを見てからだ。不死の病を得、人生に絶望し、救いを求めながらも死を恐れ、現状を否認し、孤立し、周りの全てに怒りを覚え、死と生の狭間で取り引きをし、抑鬱状態に苦しみながらもやがて全てを容認する、そういう人々への福音の書「死ぬ瞬間」の各章の扉に、はしなくも「福音の詩」を見い出したのだ。 本書の pp. 8 – 13には、タゴールを世界に紹介した詩人イェーツの序文 (Introduction) が掲載されているが、彼が如何に「ギタンジャリ」の世界に心を掴まれ、心酔していったかが生き生きと描かれていて、感動的だ。その一部を紹介すると、 I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics … display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. (p.10., ll. 7 – 13.) If the civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind which – as one divines – runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads. (pp.10., ll.16 – 20.) At every moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will understand; and it has filled itself with the circumstance of their lives. The traveler in the red-brown clothes that he wears that dust may not show upon him, the girl searching in her bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s home-coming in the empty house, are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian July, or the parching heat, are images of the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a man sitting in a boat upon a river playing upon a lute, like one of those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God Himself. (p.11., ll.3 – 13.) どうだろう。ぜひ手に取ってお読みいただきたい。日々の生活に疲弊し、人と人との摩擦や軋轢に乾いてしまった心が、緩やかに穏やかに癒されていくこと請け合いである。

• Unique and inventive poetry

  This is my favourite of Tagore's English language texts. Tagore had a unique and inventive way of conjuring up abstract images, emotions and meanings in your mind. It's like his words bypass your conscious and analytical mind and touch you at a subconscious or spiritual level. I find reading his poetry quite therapeutic. I only wish I could read Bengali so I could !

• Great book

  Gread book.. must have book

• Wunderschöner Klassiker

  Ein sehr tiefgängiges Werk in klarer, einfacher Sprache vom Nobelpreisträger und Philanthropen Rabindranath Tagore, von ihm selbst aus Bengali ins Englische übersetzt

• Boundless love for life...

  Beautiful and delicate poetry. The voice of an amazing soul with a boundless love for life. Loved it down to every single word.

• A remarkable and fascinating reinvention of a classic

  We return to Birbhum, which in the nineteenth century saw the birth of the protean figure of modern Indian literature, Rabindranath Tagore: poet, playwright, songwriter, folklorist, educational reformer, Nobel laureate. In 1912, in his fifties and with a large body of Bengali-language poetry behind him, Tagore translated a book of his "austere devotional songs" into English: GITANJALI. It was a wild success and is still many readers' introduction to Tagore; but to some its Anglo-Indian English may resemble the bad, solemn early twentieth-century slush that made "mystical verse" something people would leave the state to avoid. In 2011, with a spate of Tagore anniversaries looming (the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth in 1861; the hundredth of the publication of GITANJALI in 1912; and the hundredth of the Nobel in 1913) the British poet and translator William Radice produced a new edition of GITANJALI that would tackle some of the questions that had long attended the work. He has made a fresh translation directly from the Bengali, as Tagore's prose translations had radically altered the originals and disguised the formal variety of the collection; he has reprinted the only existing manuscript of Tagore's that Tagore had given to his friend, the artist William Rothenstein, which restores not only the original order of the poems but allows us to read them without the revisions of the printed edition, attributed largely to William Butler Yeats; and includes the version as originally published--the GITANJALI we know. It is a remarkable and fascinating reinvention of a classic, which has convinced me once again not only of the work's place in Tagore's career but of the unique quality of its vision and music. This edition is a wonderful compliment to Radice's other selection of Tagore's verse (SELECTED POEMS, Penguin, 1987), a Tagore you can recommend without apology or embarrassment, and which gives us a poet who alters your notion of twentieth-century poetry. TAGORE: AN ANTHOLOGY, edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (St. Martin's, 1997) gives a good selection of Tagore's prose, verse and non-fiction. Glenn Shea, from Glenn's Book Notes at www.bookbarnniantic.com

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