
If you can get your hands on a copy of this book, you won’t regret it. Thanks for your wonderfully well-written piece on poetry.
(Thinking to self… debating on whether to type a few more words about Gitanjali and why I felt mentioning it here is in line with what you wrote… the book speaks for itself and needs no promotion but here goes…)
I was fortunate to find a copy of Gitanjali in the discard pile of my local library when I was a teenager and took it home. It changed me. It included the original 1912 introduction by W.B. Yeats, himself a literary giant who went on to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, ten years after Rabindranath Tagore won it in large part due to the publication of Gitanjali. From Yeats’ introduction:
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 — which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention — display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing… (emphasis mine)
The entire introduction is, in and of itself, as eloquently written as you’ll find in any book but I think Yeats would agree with me when I say it still doesn’t do the collection of poems/songs justice. Gitanjali is something you have to experience for yourself.
My experience reading and rereading parts of it over the years has changed, but there are several things that struck me when first discovering it that have stuck with me.
One was an overwhelming feeling of awe and intimidation that I would never be able to write or create anything so beautiful in my life so why try. (Admittedly not the most positive takeaway).
Another was the idea that all of my most uplifting and spiritual thoughts, however clumsily I tried to express them in my native tongue, could become beautiful and even musical if translated into the right language, if such a language even existed. I mentioned this idea in one of the first pieces wrote after joining Medium, albeit while discussing another great poet I discovered later in life.
So yes. Poetry can open you up if you let it and the music does indeed lie in the words themselves. Well said. Thanks again for your post.
