69 Verses

About the Book

The book ‘69 Verses’ is a collection of songs and poems, a tiny slice, fished out from the vast sea of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s creation. These songs and poems are translated in English rhyming poetry form the original Bengali compositions. Of these 69 verses, most of them are from Gitanjali - the book that overwhelmed Yeats when he first read it, and which won Tagore the Nobel Prize in 1913 and earned a place for the modern Indian literature in the map of world literature. The entire gamut of human emotions: hopes, aspirations, fear and frustration, the joy, the pangs all find authentic expressions in the vast oeuvre of Tagore's works. The present collection is mainly intended to provide a sample of his lyrical songs tinged with mysticism. The roots of these poems hark back right to the very earliest poetic achievements of humankind ---- the ancient Vedas. They also echo the strains of the medieval mystic saints of India and the Sufis, of the wandering minstrels that have not yet been completely destroyed from the rural India by the invasive modernity. These poems thus carry the resonances of the spiritual heart of India's long history. Music is an essential quality of Tagore's mystic poems. The translator has attempted with admirable success to communicate the spirit and rhythm of the Bengali originals. This has not been attempted so far by more than one or two translators because most of the time the flavor of the original work gets subdued, subtlety of rhythm gets reduced and the delicacy of color gets lost in translation. However, here the translator has tried to retain these properties of Tagore’s creations to a considerable extent.

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