About Gitanjali

By Rabindranath Tagore · first published in 1912 · Poetry

Gitanjali means “song offerings”. Rabindranath Tagore wrote the original poems in Bengali, and in 1912, while recovering from an illness and then on a sea voyage to England, he translated a selection of them into English prose himself. He showed the notebook to friends in London. The poet W. B. Yeats carried it with him for days, reading it on trains and in restaurants, and wrote the introduction to the first edition.

The following year Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from outside Europe to receive it. The book contains 103 short pieces. They are addressed to a God who is spoken to as a friend, a lover, a king and a fellow traveller, and they draw on the devotional songs of Bengal that Tagore had known since childhood.

The language is plain and the images come from daily life in the Indian countryside: a flute, a ferry, a lamp at dusk, children playing on a shore, rain in the month of July. Poem 35, which begins “Where the mind is without fear”, is known by heart across India. Each piece is only a few lines long, so the book is best read slowly, a few at a time. This preview contains the opening songs.