Tagore for the 21st Century Reader

by Rabindranath Tagore, Arunava Sinha (Translator)

Brilliantly translated by Arunava Sinha, keeping the 21st century reader firmly in mind, this selection of Rabindranath Tagore s fiction, poetry, lyrics and drama is evidence of his position as one of the world's greatest writers.

Tagore was the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was also knighted by the British government but he repudiated the knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. A humanist and an educationist, he started the Visva-Bharati University and founded a centre of education at Shantiniketan where students and teachers lived and learned in a setting close to nature. He was married to Mrinalini Devi and had five children. Tagore passed away in August 1941, at the age of eighty. Deeply revered, his works remain the prism through which generations of readers have viewed life.

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. Twenty of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award for Sankar s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri s Seventeen (2011), respectively, he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.

486 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 "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."

Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla.

The complete works of Rabindranath Tagore (রবীন্দ্র রচনাবলী) in the original Bengali are now available at these third-party websites:
http://www.tagoreweb.in/
http://www.rabindra-rachanabali.nltr....

Reviews

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really wonderful anthology of Tagore's work. The editor has done a nice job selecting from the various genres he wrote in - poetry, short fiction, drama, novel - as well as themes that continue to resonate - especially gender and caste. The stories are compelling and cover a wide range - from love stories to ghost stories. It's a great introduction to Tagore's work if you haven't encountered his work.

[Sunny Az · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent English translation of a collection of some of Tagore's deeply moving short stories, one of his finest novels (Ghare Baire), a novella (The Monk King), and some of his lesser known (but still excellent) poetry. I don't speak Bengali, so I can't attest to Arunava Sinha's skill as a translator, but everything within this book is written in fluid, beautiful, and highly readable prose (except the poetry, of course); and it retains all the thematic complexity and human beauty you'd expect from Tagore. If you want yet another translation of Gitanjali, you won't find it here. Read it if you want a window into Tagore's work heretofore reserved for people fluent in Bangla-Bhasha.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful translation of a great masters great work....a must read for every Tagore aspirant.