Golden Boat

Selected Poems

Tagore Rabindranath

Bengali is the world's seventh most popular language in terms of the number who use it, but few have made the journey from the West to its cultural or spiritual interior. Its intellectual tradition is without equal in present-day India. Rabindranath Tagore, a true Renaissance man, is its greatest writer.

Joe Winter's selection from Tagore's more than 40 books of poetry gives a wonderful sense of his variety in lyrics, songs and narratives. It complements and extends the work he began with translating "Song Offerings" (2000).

About the Author

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of his own prose versions of his poems, greatly admired by W. B. Yeats. He was a Renaissance man – poet and writer of fiction, composer and artist and playwright, educationalist and reformer. Among writers who translated his work were Gide, Neruda, Pasternak and Akhmatova. His world tours featured debates with figures as diverse as his friend and admirer Gandhi, Einstein, Ezra Pound and H. G. Wells. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are Tagore's compositions.

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