How Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ got a new rendition in the hands of a modern poet

The original Bengali Gitanjali was published on 14 August 1910 by Indian Publishing House, 22 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta. For this, he [Rabindranath Tagore] wrote fifty new poems, culled the rest from his works, Naivédya, Khéya and Gitimala, and added some poems which had earlier appeared in periodicals. The English Gitanjali was first published in November 1912 by the Indian Society of London.

The Bengali poems, numbering 156 or 157 – depending on how one looks at it – were whittled down to 103 prose translations. He edited out fifty poems. But why the confusion about the number 156 or 157? He fused two separate poems, 89 and 90, of the Naivédya into one, which we now know as 95. The work was his to transform. Re-make. Re-present.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” states the quantum physicist Max Planck. William Blake shifts the focus somewhat when he says, “As a man is, so he sees.” Both these reflections stay with me as I work on the Gitanjali.

Initially, I was briefly persuaded to term a published excerpt as my “erasure” poems of the Gitanjali. Though erasure is a form of contained writing, its reductionist connotations didn’t agree with…

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