So where is that exactly in the Gitanjali? Oh, there are two…

So it’s Christmas. The fire is blazing, the tree lights are on. The house is cosy and it’s raining outside. I start to reflect on..something, not sure, reflecting, calming, feeling the heat of the fire, this is letting go of the stresses of the world…

Then my husband says:’You were going to help me look at that Tagore poem in Bengali.’

Ah, ha. My (lack of) knowledge of Bengali is about to be exposed. All this time I’ve been competing against a real live Bengali, and now I’m going to fail the test.

He’s desirous of translating one of the poems in the 1913 English prose translation of Gitanjali made by Tagore himself, with an introduction by WB Yeats. Translating from an English translation, yes, but he also wants to look at the original. His mother found a Bengali edition of Gitanjali and lent it to us.

‘I can understand it, as you know, but I can’t read it,’ he says, ‘Can you read out no.17.’

No.17 in his mum’s Bengali edition, even with our limited knowledge, turns out not to be the same as the English no.17. There are also only 103 poems in the English Gitanjali but there are 157 in the Bengali version. Something odd and puzzling clearly going on here…

A little research reveals that yes, the English collection is indeed not a translation of poems from the Bengali volume of the same name. While half the poems (52 out of 103) in the English text were selected from the Bengali volume, others were taken from these works (given with year and number of songs selected for the English text): Gitimallo (1914,17), Noibeddo (1901,15), Khea (1906,11) and a handful from other works. The translations were often radical, leaving out or altering large chunks of the poem and in one instance even fusing two separate poems (song 95, which unifies songs 89,90 of naivedya).

So there is a 50-50 chance that we do have the Bengali translation but not sure how long it will take me to work through all 157 on the off chance! Please can anyone shed any light on what this no.17 in the 1913 translation is from really? The original Gitanjali, the Gitimallo, the Noibeddo or the Khea? Fingers crossed it’s the first of these, not sure if my mother-in-law has any of the others.

This is the no.17 in the 1913 edition:

I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last unto his hands. That is why it is so late and why I have been guilty of such omissions. They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast; but I evade them ever, for I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.  People blame me and call me heedless; I doubt not they are right in their blame. The market day is over and work is done for the busy.  Those who came to call me in vain have gone back in anger.  I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.