Tagore Translated
Interest in Rabindranath Tagore's work is growing steadily and this interest is being satisfied by good translations of Tagore's Bengali works. A tradition of a high standard of translation was started by William Radice in the mid-eighties with his poetically sensitive renderings of Tagore's Bengali poetry into English. Radice wished his translations to be both as accurate as possible and to convey as much of the original as was possible in the target language. By now Radice's example has been followed in other European languages. Mein Vermächtnis by the distinguished indologist, Rahul Peter Das, belongs fully to this new tradition.By Victor A. van Bijlert
Mein Vermächtnis contains fresh translations directly from Bengali into German of selections from Tagore's essays. Das has selected his passages from all the periods of Tagore's writing career. The earliest passages date from 1883, the last ones from 1937. This enables the reader to observe the developments and various trends in Tagore's thinking during the crucial period of the Indian anticolonial struggle. Tagore himself had richly contributed to defining Indian national self-consciousness in his numerous writings. The translator has chosen not to present the selected passages in chronological order but has arranged them under four major subject headings: religion and culture; politics and society; literature and art; autobiographical. These correspond neatly to the major concerns in Tagore's thinking.Das has provided the texts with explanatory endnotes and full bibliographical details about the original sources. This greatly enhances the scholarly value of this book. The reader who knows Bengali is thus able to compare the translation with the original. This is quite unlike the sloppy fashion in which Tagore himself 'translated' his Bengali essays beyond recognition into English, invariably without any references to originals.
This book contains a representative but necessarily lean selection taken from hundreds of pages of Bengali originals. Das has made his selection judiciously. It is representative but very thinly so. This, however, seems quite in line with Tagore's own intentions in writing. Tagore realized that his work could easily and effectively be presented in diluted selections. He himself did this throughout his career, greatly harming his reputation as a writer and a poet. Not only did Tagore dilute his often majestic Bengali originals into weak English compositions; through his own sloppy translations he has also encouraged bad translations of his works by others. But that was during his lifetime. Apart from presenting Tagore in selection, Das' work has nothing in common with that old Tagorean convention, for Das follows the best traditions of meticulous and professional rendering. Not only does Das leave the Bengali original intact, he also conveys the vitality of the Bengali originals. Perhaps the lapse of half a century is necessary to translate Tagore properly. The distance enables us to assess the real value of Tagore's intellectual, spiritual, and literary achievements. Das' book is one more contribution to a renewed acquaintance with Tagore. The book makes for inspirational reading.
Rabindranath Tagore. Mein Vermächtnis. Aus dem bengalischen essayistischen Werk ausgewählt, übersetzt und heraugegeben von Rahul Peter Das. Mit einem Vorwort von Martin Kämpchen. München: Kösel Verlag, 1997, 160 pp. ISBN 3-466-20428-3