SHASHWAT GUPTA RAY
For more than a century, Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings) has been cele brated across the world as the work that helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Yet, hidden within that celebrated English edition was a literary gap – the complete Bengali Gitanjali had never been translated into English. It was this unfinished literary journey that Prof (Dr) Udaya Narayana Singh, a noted linguist and translator, set out to complete. In 2013, a century after Tagore’s Nobel win, Prof Singh translated all 157 poems of the original Bengali anthology into English, producing The Original Gitanjali, published by the Andorra-based publishing house Anima Viva Multilingue. Tagore’s English Gitanjali com prised 103 poems.
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However, only around 53 of these were drawn from the original 157-poem Ben gali collection, while the remain ing poems were sourced from other works. As a result, nearly two-thirds of the original Gitanjali remained untranslated in English. For Prof Singh, the task was not merely one of translation. It was an attempt to restore the integri ty of an anthology whose original thematic and poetic coherence had been obscured by the manner in which Tagore himself had reas sembled the English volume. “While serving as the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Vis va-Bharati University and a Professor at Rabindra Bhavan in 2011, in the run-up to Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, I was approached by publisher and poet Ilk Maria Angela. She pointed out that Tagore’s Nobel Prize-winning English version of Gitanjali included only about 53 poems from the original 157-poem Bengali text, with the remaining poems drawn from his other works. This meant that nearly two thirds of the original Gitanjali remained untranslated into English,” Prof Singh told O Heraldo. Speaking on the sidelines of inauguration of Translation Incubation Centre at the Government College of Arts, Sci ence and Commerce, Khandola, on Thursday, he said that to preserve the thematic coherence and meta-poetry of the original anthology, he undertook the translation of the en tire 157 poems.
Speaking about the unique selling proposition (USP) and strategy behind his translation of Gitanjali, Prof Singh said that as a translator, his goal was to bring the true flavour of the original anthology into the target language. “While Tagore focused on a specific style to make the pieces read like traditional English poems, my strategy was different. I focused on the semantics and thematics of the songs, recreating them in a way that is accessible to the common English reader rather than just a Euro pean audience. Tagore’s highly formal, Latinate language projected him as an ancient Indian sage. In contrast, my objective was to present him as a modern world poet,” he said. Despite the potential challenges of interpreting such deeply familiar songs, he got deeply engrossed into the entire translation process. “The process was unique. I felt almost in a trance, com pleting the entire translation in just six months,” he said.
