Song Offering
Encyclopedia
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
poet Rabindranath Thakur
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
, rendered into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
by the poet himself, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
for literature in 1913.
Contents
Song Offerings is often identified as the English rendering of GitanjaliGitanjali
Gitanjali is a collection of 103 English poems, largely translations, of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore.This volume became very famous in the West, and was widely translated....
, a volume of poetry by poet Rabindranath Thakur
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
composed between 1904 and 1910 and published in 1910. Gitanjali contained 157 short lyrics while 103 poems of Song Offerings contained poems from nine more poetry in addition to Gitanjali. Poems of the ten volumes are as follows:
- Gitanjali - 51 poems
- Geetmalya - 17 poems
- Naibadya - 16 poems
- Kheya - 11 poems
- Shishu - 3 poems
- Chaitali - 1 poems
- Smaran - 1 poems
- Kalpana - 1 poems
- Utsarga - 1 poems
- Acholayatan - 1 poems
Song Offerings is a collection of devotional songs to the supreme. The deep-rooted spiritual essence of the volume is brought out from the following extract :
My debts are large,
my failures great,
my shame secret and heavy;
yet I come to ask for my good,
I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
(Poem 28, Song Offering)
Nature of translation
Rabindranath Thakur took the liberty of doing free translation while rendering these 113 poems into English. Consequently, in many cases these are transcreationsTranscreation
The term transcreation refers to the concept of adapting a message from one language into another, whilst maintaining the same intent, style and tone. A transcreated message needs to evoke the same emotions and carry the same implications as the original...
rather than translation; however, literary biographer Edward Thomson
Edward Thomson
Edward Thomson was an American Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church , elected in 1864.-Early life:Thomson was born in Portsea, part of Portsmouth, England...
found them 'perfect' and 'enjoyable'. A reader can himself realize the approach taken by Rabindranath in translating his own poem with that translated by a professional translator. First is quoted lyric no. 1 of Song Offering as translated by Rabindranath himself :
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,
and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,
and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands
my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
It is the Lyric number ... of Gitanjali. Here is the English rendering of the same poem by Joe Winter
Joe Winter
Joe Winter is a British educationist and poet who is renowned for translating poets Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das.-Biography:He was born in London in 1943 and educated, amongst others, at Exeter College, Oxford. He taught English in secondary schools in London from 1967 to 1994. Taking...
translated in 1997 :
Publications
The first edition of Song Offerings was published in 1912 from LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
by the India Society. It was priced ten and a half shillings. The second edition was published by The Macmillan Company in 1913 and was priced at four and a half shillings.
The second edition contained a sketch of the poet by Rothenstein
John Rothenstein
Sir John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein CBE was an English art historian. He grew up in London the son of Sir William Rothenstein. The family was loosely connected to the Bloomsbury Set. John Rothenstein studied at Oxford University and became friends with T. E. Lawrence...
(see the image on right), in addition to an invaluable preface by W. B. Yeats.
Introduciton by Yeats
Nobel Prize in 1913
In 1913, Rabindranath Thakur was awarded the Nobel PrizeNobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
for literature. Evaluation of Thakur as a great poet was based mainly on the evaluation of Song Offerings, in addition to the recommendations that put his name on the short list. In awarding the prize to Rabindranth, the Nobel committee stated: "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West" The Nobel committee recognized him as "an author who, in conformity with the express wording of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, had during the current year, written the finest poems «of an idealistic tendency." The Nobel Committee finally quoted from Song Offering and stated that Rabindranath in thought-impelling pictures, has shown how all things temporal are swallowed up in the eternal:
Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.
There is none to count thy minutes.
Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers.
Thou knowest how to wait.
Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.
We have no time to lose, and having no time, we must scramble for our chances.
We are too poor to be late.
And thus it is that time goes try,
while I give it to every querulous man who claims it,
and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.
At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut;
but if I find that yet there is time.
(Gitanjali, No. 82)
In response to the announcement of the Nobel prize, Rabindranath sent a telegram saying, "I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother." This was read out Mr. Clive, the-then British Chargé d'Affaires (CDA) in Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
, at the Nobel Banquet at Grand Hôtel, Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
, on 10 December 1913. Eight years after the Nobel Prize was awarded, Rabindranath went to Sweden in 1921 to give his acceptance speech.