Jewel That Is Best , livre ebook

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When Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature in1913, it reinforced the power he had to touch readers across countries and cultures. The Jewel That Is Best comprises three volumes of Tagore s poetry Particles (ika),)Kan Jottings (Lekhan) and Sparks (Sphuli?ga). The poems are quiet, philosophical observations that carry as much meaning as mystery, as much sensitivity as objectivity. Written at various points in the poet's long life, they remain resonant even today. It was perhaps his imagination as a painter that enabled Tagore to combine humanity, nature and science on one canvas, a harmony strongly felt in these verses. Each poem is a gem delicately arranged with the others. They continue to sparkle in William Radice's elegant and faithful translation.
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14 janvier 2011

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9788184755701

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English

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1 Mo

Rabindranath Tagore
The Jewel That Is Best
Collected Brief Poems
TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION by William Radice
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
PARTICLES
JOTTINGS
SPARKS
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Note on this Edition
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE JEWEL THAT IS BEST
Born in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore was one of the key figures of the Bengal Renaissance. He started writing at an early age, and by the turn of the century had become a household name in Bengal. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and his verse collection Gitanjali came to be known internationally. At about the same time, he founded Visva-Bharati, a university located in Santiniketan, near Kolkata. Tagore steered clear of active politics, but is famous for returning the knighthood conferred on him as a gesture of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
Tagore was a pioneering literary figure, known for his ceaseless innovations in art and literature. His works include some sixty collections of verse, like Manasi (The Ideal One), Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat), Gitimalya (Wreath of Songs), and Balaka (The Flight of Cranes). He also wrote novels, plays, dance dramas, nearly a hundred short stories, essays on religious, social and literary topics, and over 2500 songs (words and music), including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. As a painter, he has a unique place in modern Indian art. He died in 1941.
William Radice has pursued a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali. He is well known for his translations of the poems, stories and plays of Tagore, of which Selected Poems and Selected Short Stories were reprinted several times. In 2009 he was awarded the title of Rabindra Tattwacharya by the Tagore Research Institute, Kolkata. He has also published nine books of his own poems and has been teaching Bengali at SOAS, University of London, since 1988. His literary work in recent years has included opera libretti, and his many books include Myths and Legends of India and Teach Yourself Bengali. He has recently translated The Poem of the Killing of Meghn d by Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Gitanjali by Tagore, both for Penguin India.
to Martin K mpchen
Da du du selbst bist bin ich in deiner Schuld
Preface
This book follows my earlier translations of Rabindranath Tagore for Penguin: Selected Poems (1985, rev. 1987, 1993, 1994, 2005) and Selected Short Stories (1991, rev. 1994, 2005). In those two books, selection was forced on me by the enormous size of Tagore s output. One can imagine, ultimately, a complete English translation of his short stories, but not of his poems or songs. It will therefore remain difficult for the non-Bengali reader to appreciate his oeuvre in its entirety.
By translating all three of his books of brief poems, however, I hope to show what he achieved in this particular genre. As with the poems and stories, I have also tried to set the translations in context by supplying an extensive Introduction. There seemed no need for Notes at the end; but in the Appendices I have translated some prose pieces that shed light on the poems method and underlying thought. The book ends with two short texts given to me by a friend in Kolkata that have not-even in Bengali-been published before.
The translations are mine alone, but I have greatly benefited from careful and perceptive comments by Arun Deb of Konnagar ( Particles and Jottings ), Maya Al-Farooq of the S dasien-Institut in Heidelberg ( Sparks ) and Gopa Majumdar of London (translations in the Introduction and Appendices).
Valuable comments from the English reader s point of view were made by the late Robert Goodwin, who encouraged me in my work for over twenty years; and by my mother-in-law, Joy Stephenson.
I wrote the Introduction in February and March 1998 in Rabindra Bhavana, Santiniketan. I thank the staff there for their help and kindness, the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, for sabbatical leave, and the British Academy for the grant that made the visit possible.
I was inspired to translate Tagore s brief poems by Martin K mpchen s German translations of a hundred of them in Auf des Funkens Spitzen (K sel-Verlag, M nchen, 1989; expanded to 120 in a pocket-sized edition, 1997). In so many aspects of my work, Dr K mpchen has been an unfailing mentor and friend, through correspondence and through meetings in Germany and Santiniketan. There are several people without whom this book would not have been completed, but without Martin-d (as he is known to his many friends in Santiniketan and Ghosaldanga) I don t think I would have started it: hence its dedication, which quotes from his translation of Sphuli ga 77 (No. 29 in the expanded edition of Auf des Funkens Spitzen ).
1999
Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees how they join
Walt Whitman, Song of the Answerer
Introduction
Master that he was of all poetic genres, Rabindranath Tagore is said to have been asked at times, Why haven t you written an epic? There are several answers he could have given. He could have said that he did not think he could match up to the great classical epics of India, the Mah bh rata and R m ya a . Or he could have said that modern Bengali literature already had a major literary epic, Meghn dbadh k bya ( The Poem of the Killing of Meghn d ) by Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873), based on the R m ya a. but deeply influenced by Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton. Tagore had cut his teeth as a literary critic with two harsh critiques of Madhusudan s epic, published in the journal Bh rat in 1877 and 1882. He was perhaps never fully reconciled to it, but he came to accept its canonical status and knew that it would be hard to equal. A third answer could have been that the tedious, nationalistic epic poetry of Nabinchandra Sen (1847-1909) had given the genre a bad name. But in a poem in K a ik (1900) titled K atip ra ( Compensation ), Tagore wittily lays the blame on his essentially lyrical muse:
I had been toying
With the thought of writing
An epic-
Until,
Stumbling at the jingle
Of your anklets and bangles,
My musings were shattered
Into songs innumerable:
Through that mishap
My epic was scattered
As particles
Round your feet.
I had been toying
With the thought of writing
An epic
Underlying these lines is the comprehensiveness of Tagore s poetic ambition, his desire to achieve creative pur at or fullness on an almost cosmic scale; but at the same time a tendency for that fullness to be expressed not in a single great work but in an endless stream of smaller ones. The epic vision that he undoubtedly possessed has been broken by his muse into separate grains or particles that together make up the whole, with each perhaps containing the potential for the whole.
The word used for particle in this poem is ka ; its diminutive-implying even smaller particles-is ka ik , which Tagore used as the title of the first of three books of poems in which, more than in any other books that he wrote, the large is expressed through the small. The present volume is a translation of all three. What English word best describes these poems? Some people have called them epigrams; but the gnomic, ironic, often malicious connotations of the epigram, aptly conveyed by Coleridge s definition, a dwarfish whole/ Its body brevity, and wit its soul 1 -are not, for the most part, appropriate for Tagore. Aphorism is better, and may be valid for Tagore s own English translations of his poems of this sort, but the term is not usually applied to poetry, and every poem in the present volume is most definitely a poem, not a prose maxim or pens e . Moreover, the worldly yet subversive motive behind many aphorisms, particularly in the French tradition, is again not present in Tagore. 2
Tagore himself coined the term kabitik ( poemlet ), a diminutive of kabit ( poem ). But that sounds too twee in English. We need a term that does not draw attention to itself unduly, but which is novel enough to capture the originality of Tagore s achievement in this genre, its uniqueness in world literature. I have decided to speak of his brief poems . Brief is more absolute than short , which is too variable and relative a term to be useful here, unless we say very short poems . Brief also, through its rich literary associations, places the poems sub specie aeternitatis : the right context for them. Dictionary citations for brief convey its flavour: Out, out, breefe Candle ( Macbeth ) in the OED ; How brief the life of man ( Hamlet ) in Webster s New International Dictionary. Beyond English usage lies Vita brevis ars longa and other classical tags. Webster also gives a quotation from Ben Jonson that perfectly captures the character of Tagore s brief poems: The brief style is that which expresseth much in little.
The stream that started with Ka ik continued to flow, amidst numerous other kinds of writing and activity, for the remaining forty-two years of Tagore s life. If we include all the brief poems that he wrote in many countries for friends, hosts, autograph-hunters, brides and bridegrooms, for children at their name-giving ceremonies, or as obituaries, we do not know exactly how many he wrote, as they are still being discovered and collected. But there are good reasons, as I shall argue later, for confining the category to the three books Ka ik ( Particles , 1899), Lekhan ( Jottings , 1927) and the first edition of Sphuli ga ( Sparks , posthumously published in 1945).
Ka ik ( Particles ) was published on the fourth day of the month of Agrah ya , 1306 BE (19 November 1899). 3 For the previous decade, Tagore had been living in the Padma river

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