Nobel Laureate Tagore
General translation
August 15, 2008
Mohammad Shahidul Islam
Rabindranath Tagore, being first Bengali and Asian, won Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 principally for his prose translations of Gitanjali (song offerings).
William Rothenstein, Tagore's friend, the noted English painter and art reviewer, was deeply fascinated to the South Asian poetic works. He especially was drawn to Gitanjali, Bengali for "song offerings." The delicate beauty and charm of these poems prompted Rothenstein to urge Tagore to translate them into English so more people in the West could experience them. Unenthusiastically, with much persuasion, Tagore let him have the notebook. The painter could not believe his eyes. The poems were incredible. He called his friend, the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, also a Nobel Laureate (1923), and finally talked Yeats into looking at the hand scrawled notebook.