God, you have sent messengers, life after life, to this callous earth. What did you think of that ? Or take the following. You imagined your Meghaduta! Each sonorous stanza contains, for grief-struck lovers a thrilling cadenza. If you are not a Bengali, you will probably not even know what I am talking about. But if you are a Bengali, I hope you will agree that these translations are truly terrible. It takes a poet to translate a poet, the process is more one of transcreation. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson are not poets.
Earlier, Krishna Dutta has translated Tagores short stories and letters, Andrew Robinson has authored books on Satyajit Ray and Tagores art. To quote the authors on the poetry translations, We are not fully satisfied with the results, but we take some comfort from the fact that Nirad C Chaudhuri and Satyajit Ray, brilliantly bilingual in Bengali and English, both thought Tagores poetry virtually untranslatable.
Admittedly, this book is more about Tagore the man and less about his art and drawings. But the two are related. Outside Bengal, Tagore is still remembered as a poet. However, within Bengal, in addition to the poetry, one remembers his short stories, songs, plays and essays. His novels have not had a lasting impact. Given this, the sampling of Tagores art provided by Dutta and Robinson reflects a bias. They are poetry and essay specific. There is very little about short stories, songs receive a passing mention. As I said earlier, when the authors themselves translate the poetry, the translations are often bad.
Perhaps Bengalis are not meant to read this book. But a biographer of Tagore writing in English must have a different readership in mind, somewhat as Tagore himself did when he translated his work into English. One can primarily aim at non-Indians, or at Indians who are not Bengalis, or at the large number of Bengalis who like to read seriously in English. What one cannot do is to give equal attention to the interests of all three groups. We have therefore had to make a choice. This book is for non-Indians, for Indians who are not Bengalis, and for Bengalis
