The Essential Tagore Tagore Rabindranath

• Auteur : Tagore Rabindranath
• Editeur : Harvard Univ Pr
• Langue : Anglais
• Parution : 01/04/2011
• Nombre de pages : 819
• Dimensions : 24.2 x 17.2 x 5.3

Critique / Article
There have been a number of attempts, in the century since Yeats made [the] request, to give the English reader a fuller and more accurate sense of Rabindranath Tagore--through new translations, anthologies of his work, critical studies, and biographies. But The Essential Tagore, published to coincide with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Tagore's birth, is the most substantial one yet. -- Adam Kirsch New Yorker 20110530 This new anthology, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, is so welcome, because it starts the process of freeing Tagore for a contemporary audience. The first thing that strikes you about The Essential Tagore is the diversity of its subject's talents: In a career that stretched over seventy-three years (he finished his first poem when he was seven, and was composing a story on his deathbed), Tagore wrote novels, plays, literary criticism, political essays on the iniquities of the British Raj, and descriptions of his travels in Persia and Japan. Yet it is to the poems that one turns immediately. The range is dizzying--Tagore composed devotional, patriotic, erotic, and nature verse--and is tackled here by a phalanx of gifted translators, including [Amit] Chaudhuri...[The Essential Tagore] reintroduces a great writer to the world. The most luminous discovery in this anthology is not any particular poem or essay but the cumulative evocation of the poet's personality...The experience of living in today's India--a country that is agrarian, industrializing, and postindustrial, all at once--still forces a multiplicity of viewpoints on the individual, and Tagore must have some claim to being the prototypical modern Indian. -- Aravind Adiga Bookforum 20110901 As the generously weighty and elegantly produced Essential Tagore from Harvard testifies, Tagore wrote in many diverse modes, and quite distinct aspects of his genius often come into play. -- Seamus Perry Times Literary Supplement 20110916