Gitanjali: A Poetry Collection by Rabindranath Tagore
These poems were highly influential and won Tagore the Nobel Literature Prize in 1913
Gitanjali (or Gitanjoli) is the title of what is probably the best-known poetry collection by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was a native of Kolkata (Calcutta) and he wrote in Bengali. Gitanjali translates as “song offerings”, although the word “anjali” translates more closely as “offered prayers”, so the songs being offered should, in Western eyes, be seen rather more as devotions than as secular songs.
The collection was originally compiled in 1910 as a set of poems in Bengali, but Tagore, who had spent two years in England as a law student, translated these into English for a volume that was finally published in 1912. However, of the 103 poems in the English volume, only 52 came from the original Bengali collection. He added translations from three other collections, some of the poems of which had been written more than ten years previously. The translations were not necessarily made directly from a Bengali poem into an English one; considerable editing was done, with new material added and, on one occasion, two Bengali poems were fused together to make a single English poem.
