PEOPLE who do not understand Bengali have much to thank William Radice for bringing out the greatness in Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry. Many scholars, including Tagore himself, translated his poems, songs, plays and essays into English but they left non-Bengalis with an uneasy feeling that Bengalis, congenitally prone to exaggeration, also overestimated Tagore as a writer. And on account of the fact that most Bengalis are very thin-skinned few people dared to question their reverence for their Gurudev. I was rash enough to do so by airing my opinion that other Indians, including Bengalis, had written better novels, plays and short stories and barely managed to save myself from being lynched in the lounge of Calcutta’s airport hotel. That did not prevent the Bengal Vidhan Sabha and the Rajya Sabha from passing unanimous resolutions condemning me. I partly redeemed myself when I published a lengthy review of Radice’s earlier translations admitting that Tagore was indeed a great writer of songs.

William Radice is currently Senior Lecturer in Bengali at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He is also a poet and writes a fortnightly Letter from England for The Statesman. His latest work is hitherto untranslated writings of Gurudev: Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (Harper Collins). The strange title, in fact, stands for three genres of poetry to which Tagore himself gave names Kanika (particles, or kabitika), Lekhan (jottings) and Sphulinga (sparks, published posthumously in 1945). They are reminiscent of the kind of messages sent out by Panchtantra tales and Aesop’s fables but are in verse. Tagore was almost forced to compose them during his tours abroad, particularly to China and Japan. His admirers and autograph-hunters would insist he write a few lines on whatever was handy: slips of paper, paper fans, napkins etc. He obliged. Many of them were lost for ever; some were copied out by family members and friends accompanying him.

Tagore was deeply rooted in Indian tradition, deeper than any of his contemporaries or any Indian poet after him. O.E. Lessing rightly remarked "Tagore is perhaps the last great poet of ancient India". This is amply borne out by Radice’s compilation. They are indeed as claimed by him, "pointed, witty, lucid and profound". Here are a few examples:

I am an admirer of K.P.S. Gill and share his passion for Scotch, dames and poetry. But he is a doer; I only an voyeur. Doing got him into trouble; ogling has not created any problems for me. I only read poetry; he reads as well as writes it. A common friend Dr Lakhshmi Goswami of Tezpur (Assam) sent me his composition of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.

Who will call you just and fair?

Contributed by G.C. Bhandari, Meerut