Lost in Translation: The perception of Tagore in the West

Last year, Chinese writer Feng Tang became the centre of controversy as his translation of Tagore's poems, collectively published in a volume titled Stray Birds, raised an uproar that culminated in it being pulled from the shelves. Deemed too vulgar, the writer staunchly defended his stance stating “Most Chinese grew up thinking Tagore was mild and romantic, all stars, gardens and flowers. So with my translation, many people felt like their Tagore had been challenged.” The issue raised pertinent questions, one being of authorship authority and the creative freedom translators can be accorded, and the impact translated works had on Tagore's marketability outside the subcontinent.

Tagore's indomitability in the Bangalee cultural scene owes to his unfading relevance, as well as the progressiveness of his works and his activism surrounding nationalism and educational reforms. However, in the West, Tagore's image has been boxed; a romantic ascetic who gave new hope to a modern civilisation in the destructive wake of the First World War. The West's induction to Tagore came with the publication of Gitanjali, or Song Offerings, which put him at the centre of the literary hub of the 1920s. “Gitanjali was a book about a deeper communion with God or a super soul without naming God in any denomination. The world was in deep turmoil – there had been the Crimean War in 1853, followed by the Serbo-Bulgarian War, the Boer War in South Africa, tensions in the Balkans, and the Irish Civil War which was brewing. All of these circumstances made clear that the world was a very dangerous place to be in, and mankind was renouncing their Biblical commitment…Gitanjali was the spiritual respite from the Western suffering,” said Syed Manzoorul Islam.

The West's obsession with Gitanjali blinded them from Tagore's other works, which were ironically more in keeping with the Western modern ideologies prevalent at the time, refuting their acceptance of him as a sage. Gitanjali had no sequel, and in 1916 he began a series of lectures surrounding anti-nationalism which made him largely unpopular. By the 1930's, he had completely faded from view.

The Imperialistic attitude towards Tagore and their eventual rejection of him was an extension of their rhetoric of the East, which is shrouded in an oriental mysticism in their literature. The distant projection of the East meant it could never be on par with the West, an ideal that was forcefully reinforced in their regime. Thomas Babington Macaulay's scathing opinion of the inferiority of the East (in his argument in “A Minute on Indian Education”) was one of the discussions that led up to the English Education Act of 1835, where he stated, “I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.” Thus it is unsurprising to see today, that while the East has many adaptations of Western literature from Shakespeare to Eugene O'Neill, it is hardly ever the other way round.

Tagore, who was fascinated by the idea of having his works read in English, translated the Gitanjali himself, the version that carried over the shores. Bemoaned as a distanced original by Bangla readers, the translation lacked the cultural richness of the original text and was deemed inadequate even in the light of English proficiency. However, the translation resulted in bold experimentations in subsequent times, resulting in alterations of the original text that was happily encouraged by the Bard.