Essays

When Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 14 November 1913, the question on everyone’s lips was: Who is this poet with the unpronounceable name? The Swedish Academy presenting the prize circulated a brief biography that was more fantasy than real and served only to reinforce the orientalising image that the Europeans had. Up until today Tagore remains the man with the flowing beard and dignified countenance, whom children in Germany during the 1920s would address as “dear God” or “Father God” in awestruck terror.

His reputation as a “mystic”, “prophet” and “sage” cannot be shaken off entirely: his quota-tions continue to appear in calendars and self-edification books; his texts adorn volumes with idyllic photographs. However, even in Germany, there is now ample reason to move away from this rather trivialising image of Tagore and to approach him as a poet of world literature, a pioneer of pedagogy, a modern painter and religious philosopher.

Tagore was awarded the prize for one work; the only one that had then appeared in English: Gitanjali, a collection of lyrical prose texts with an emotional, mystical content. Tagore had translated these himself from his mother tongue Bengali and published them in London with the help of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who also wrote an admiring introduction. That was in 1912. A year later he received the Nobel Prize for this slim volume. Tagore was the first Nobel laureate of the non-Western world. Many countries in Asia, Africa and South America were then in the grip of European colonisers, who not only subjugated them politically but also humiliated them culturally. The Nobel Prize for an Indian, consequently, enhanced the status of the culture – and especially the literature – of his country, and by extension that of all “third world” countries. Tagore thus perceived himself to be the voice of India, of Asia and of oppressed people. He undertook nine major journeys around the world on their behalf, during which he met poets and intellectuals and also politicians in the host countries. He championed the cause of international understanding, of understanding between the “East” and the “West” – which in those days meant Asia and the western world – and between cultures and religions. He opposed nationalism of all stripes, including Zionism, and called for a rapprochement between colonial powers and colonised peoples based on common humanist ideals.

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861 into a wealthy and culturally vibrant fami-ly. Each of Tagore’s 13 siblings was extraordinarily talented. He himself took to poetry very early. At a young age he wrote songs and plays that were performed in the courtyard of the family mansion. From the outset Tagore proved to be multi-talented. He not only wrote plays but also composed songs, developed his own style of dance, directed, acted, sang and danced on stage. For him drama was not just pleasant entertainment but also a “pedagogical institution”, an instrument for opening the world to the boys and girls in the school he later founded. His engagement with theatre in this respect is similar to Goethe's.

By the time he was 30, Tagore was the most well-known poet in his language; he had married and was raising five children. The days of eccentrically brilliant experimentation were over. His father sent him to oversee the family’s estates (in what today is Bangladesh), where for the first time he was confronted with the harsh reality of peasant life. He described this in his stories and letters and took up the cause of his family’s tenant farmers. Rural life retained its hold on him for ever after.

A decade later, in 1901, he and his family moved to Santiniketan, 150 km north of Calcut-ta, where Rabindranath's father had a country estate. Once there, Rabindranath set up a school for his own and some other children that would implement his creative vision of an education that was music-based and fostered personality development. From his base in Santiniketan he was for some years one of the leading figures in the political struggle for national identity and independence. Amidst this constant stream of activity, there was a prolific outpouring of poems – in all, about 60 volumes of poetry – and novels, stories, essays, dramas and letters. He also wrote and composed over two thousand songs, many of which have become part of the Bengali folk song tradition today.

In his poetry he was constantly reinventing himself, even in his final poems. His lyrical, songlike verse evolved into complex hymns and dramatic ballads, finally culminating in existentially questioning, sparely worded poems that eschewed rhyme and verse in favour of everyday language. Love, nature and religion are themes that run through his works like a sturdy silver thread through fabric. Yet from his pen also emerged irony, humour, childlike poetry and nonsense verse. Tagore’s religious poems turn against the ascetic traditions of Hinduism. He propagated a world-affirming spirituality that embraced the senses. This was an idea that occupied him for his entire life and inspired numerous poems.

The Nobel Prize drastically changed Tagore’s secluded life in the country. All of a sudden he became an international celebrity, to be known and cheered. He journeyed through Japan and China, travelled to America and Europe soon after the First World War, visited South Ameri-ca, Egypt and later Iran and Iraq. He accepted invitations from Mussolini’s Italy and the communist Soviet Union. He met scholars, poets and politicians and held lectures and readings of his poems everywhere. His three visits to Germany (1921, 1926 and 1930) were an overwhelming success, and he visited Austria twice (1921, 1926). The wellknown publisher Kurt Wolff promptly had all of Tagore’s works that had been translated into English by Tagore or by his associates translated into German. Between 1914 and 1925 no fewer than 25 books appeared, including an eight-volume edition of his collected works. According to the publishers, Tagore’s total print run was over a million copies.

The Indian poet accepted an invitation from Baltic philosopher Hermann Keyserling to attend a “Tagore week” in Darmstadt. He met Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Stefan Zweig in Salzburg, Thomas Mann in Munich, Martin Buber and Paul Natorp in Darmstadt, Rudolf Otto in Marburg and Albert Einstein several times in Berlin. Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Zimmer and Albert Schweizer all wrote about him. During this early period Tagore was translated from Bengali to German only once, by Helene Meyer-Franck. She began translating Tagore from English and once the Tagore wave had subsided, learnt Bengali and translated a collection of poems, which however could be published only after the War (Mit meinen Liedern hab ich dich gesucht, 1946).

Consigned to oblivion during the Nazi period, Tagore’s books were reprinted after World War II, both in the Federal Republic (Hyperion Verlag) as well as and in far greater numbers in the GDR (Verlag Volk und Welt). In the GDR, a four-volume Tagore publication appeared around 1961 along with several other prose translations, partly from Bengali, to mark the poet’s 100th birthday. In 1987, Alokeranjan Dasgupta, a Bengali poet living in Heidelberg, and Lothar Lutze brought out Der andere Tagore ¹ (The Other Tagore) , a collection of poetry and prose translated from Bengali. The first comprehensive anthology translated entirely from the original, with comments and an introduction, was Das goldene Boot (The Golden Boat, 2005) ² edited by Martin Kämpchen.

These translations along with enactments of Tagore on stage, as with the timeless piece The Post Office, were able to secure for Tagore the position he deserves in our collective imagination, namely as the national poet of India, who shaped an era, and as a representative of world literature, whose works and ideas continue to exert an influence and in many ways can reinvigorate European thought and intellectual life.

References

1. Der andere Tagore. Eine Werkauswahl. Hrsg. von Alokeranjan Dasgupta. Wolf Mersch Verlag, Freiburg 1987.
2. Rabindranath Tagore, Das goldene Boot. Lyrik, Prosa, Dramen. Rabindranath Tagore, Das goldene Boot. Lyrik, Prosa, Dramen. Martin Kämpchen (Ed.). Translated from the Bengali by Rahul Peter Das, Alokeranjan Dasgupta, Hans Harder, Martin Kämpchen and Lothar Lutze; translated from the English by Andor Orand Carius and Axel Monte. Verlag Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf / Zürich 2005 (Winkler Weltliteratur).