The Lover of God (Lannan Literary Selections) - Softcover

Tagore, Rabindranath

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556591969 ISBN 13: 9781556591969

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2003

Synopsis

Tagore's supressed book now available in an English-Bengali edition

For the first time in English, here is the sequence of poems Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861 1941) worked on his entire life the erotic and emotionally powerful dialogue about Lord Krishna and his young lover Radha.

These "song offerings" are the first poems Tagore ever published, though he passed them off as those of an unknown Bengali religious poet. As the first and last poems Tagore wrote and revised, they represent the entrance and exit to one of the most prolific literary lives of our contemporary world.

The translation rights to Tagore’s poetry were tightly guarded until 2001, when they entered the public domain, making publication of this book possible. These English versions are the result of a five-year collaboration between Bengali scholar Tony K. Stewart, who provided richly associative literal translations, and the celebrated poet Chase Twichell, who shaped the poems into English. This bilingual Bengali-English edition also includes the "biography" Tagore wrote of the unknown religious poet who supposedly authored these poems.

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Bengal, the youngest son of a religious reformer and scholar. He wrote successfully in all literary genres and is the author of the national anthems for both India and Bangladesh. In his mature years he managed the family estates, which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He participated in the Indian nationalist movement, and was a devoted friend of Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913; he was knighted in 1915 by the British Government, but later resigned the honor as a protest against British policies in India.

About this title

About the Author:

Chase Twichell is the author of five books of poetry and the best-selling Practice of Poetry. She is the founding editor of Ausable Press and lives in rural New York, with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks.

From Booklist:

When these 22 poems began appearing in Calcutta in 1875, they seemed the work of a seventeenth-century Bengali scholar-poet. But they were a hoax at the expense of European-inspired literary archaeologists mining Indian literature for forgotten treasure. Their real author was the 14-year-old son of a prominent Bengali businessman. Moreover, though he was coy about their worth throughout his long career, the 1913 Nobel laureate last revised them mere weeks before his death in 1941. Twichell's free versions, based on Stewart's literal parsings and printed face-to-face with the Bengali text, evoke the spiritual content that kept Tagore's interest: the longing for god that only death fulfills. Directly about the beloved of adolescent Krishna during his sojourn as a human, the poems contain two voices, that of the longing girl, Radha, and that of a counselor, seemingly an older woman, who consoles her and chides the god for his absence. An introduction, a postscript, and a translation of Tagore's facetious biography of the ostensible poet invaluably complete a lovely volume. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1556591969
• ISBN 13: 9781556591969
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90