Rereading Rabindranath Tagore

The celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in May began early in the month and will continue until next year. The event passed without much comment in Britain, but was noted by Ian Jack in the Guardian, and JC, in his notebook in the TLS. They enquired, pertinently, whether Tagore was worth making a fuss about. In fact, JC wanted to know: "Who reads Rabindranath Tagore now?" Any man dressed in a loose robe-like garment, and whose poetry, at least in English translation, comprises lines such as the one Jack quotes ("Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark"), is up, in Britain, for a laugh.

Jack reminds us of Philip Larkin's opinion, expressed vividly in a letter: "An Indian has written to ask what I think of Rabindrum Tagore. Feel like sending him a telegram: 'Fuck all. Larkin.'" This could be Larkin the epistolary racist. Or it could be Larkin the poet who deployed expletives to arraign the polite, the poet who, in a poem called "Sunny Prestatyn", records with satisfaction how the original poster ("Come to sunny Prestatyn") is gradually defaced by "Titch Thomas" with a drawing of a "tuberous cock and balls". One can feel some of the liberating electricity Larkin feels in placing "fuck all" in close proximity to "Tagore". He and to a certain extent Jack (who's remarkably equable in his piece) are of a generation that had Tagore, as Karl Miller once told me, "shoved down our throats". As an early 20th-century elixir, like Cod Liver Oil or Waterbury's Compound, Tagore was always destined to date, and even the irritation he caused to be forgotten.

So it's encouraging to discover that at least the irritation hasn't vanished entirely. At the same time, I feel a surge of empathy for Jack and JC, and all who can't read Tagore in Bengali, who must endure the most popular English translations (which are still Tagore's own), and take on trust there's something out there worth celebrating. Jack points out there's very little in Tagore's own translations worth quoting from. At first glance, this seems absolutely true. Although Tagore has had some good translators (Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Sunetra Gupta, Sukanta Chaudhuri, William Radice), it seems his own translations have permanently superseded any regard for his originals, just as, for a while, Ben Kingsley's Gandhi eclipsed Gandhi in the popular imagination.

Tagore's English version of the Gitanjali, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1913, is what Mother Teresa once was to Calcutta, the royal family to England, and Kingsley to Gandhi: a tantalising mirage that obstructs the view of what's behind it. And the Tagorean abstraction (not just from the Gitanjali, but from a variety of his "translations") is remarkably hardy, and will not go away: "Rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes." Plucked out of the air thus, they're ludicrous. And one can't think how the original would be better.

But poetry that possesses a high degree of abstraction is particularly hard to translate (especially, some would add, to a language attuned to empiricism such as English). For instance, what do we make of these? "Ah and around this / centre: the rose of Onlooking / blooms and unblossoms"; "With nothing of language but / A beating in the sky / From so precious a place yet / Future verse will rise"; "O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not! / Not for the bards of the past, not to invoke them have I launched you forth"; "I said many things to him, for whatever poets / Think and sing is mostly the angels' and his"; "All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind." The first is from Rilke; the second from Mallarmé; the third isn't a translation at all, but is from Whitman; the fourth is from Hölderlin; the fifth from the charlatan Khalil Gibran. It's Gibran's ingratiating proffering of wisdom that gives him away; but the others don't come across too well either. Indeed, Mallarmé, a crucial figure in the history of modernism, is a bit of a disaster in English. Yet, in contrast to Tagore, there's no fundamental debate about him, because we take the French and modernist canons on trust, and the Anglophone critics who made up their mind about him were multilingual. Hölderlin is similarly challenging to translate, but nevertheless accorded respect: possibly because he spent a year in an asylum. Yet there's a stretching of language toward abstraction in the work of these poets that makes it difficult to present in another language.

In Tagore's case, at least one reason for the abstraction (though he can also be wonderfully sensuous) is the historical moment he occupies. He arrived at a time when he could no longer write songs to Kali, like the 18th-century Ramprasad, or odes to Krishna and Radha like the poets Chandidas and Vidyapati. The old religion had been dismantled by the likes of his father Debendranath, and his father's older contemporary Raja Rammohun Roy, the various deities banished in favour of a new Upanishadic unitarianism, and then of a revolutionary, secular view of the universe. Tagore is the poet of this turning point; he can't write of the old particulars – Radha, Krishna, Kali, and their context – and must approach language anew; as absolutely as Hölderlin, but less explicitly, he bids farewell to the gods. The effect of their departure probably drove the German poet insane. Tagore's response was another kind of insanity, a continuous and incandescent affirmation of what DH Lawrence called "life itself", making him a proponent of a religion he called (notice how mawkish the English coinage sounds) the "religion of man".

To write another defence of Tagore seems besides the point; and reinterpreting him to western readers should perhaps be the least of his admirers' concerns (partly because he was once attacked by Bengalis more than by any other group). When Jack pointed out that the Oxford Book of Quotations had nothing in it by Tagore, I wondered what the poet's own view on quotation was. I found that not only did Tagore quote frequently and revealingly, but that quotation was central to formulating his aesthetic. Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children's rhyme "Jal pare / pata nare" ("Rain falls / the leaf trembles") in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar's Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore's memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or "high" Bengali: "Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe" ("Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth"). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience.

Yet as a Bengali poet, Tagore's instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason why the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. "Rain falls" and "the leaf trembles" are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don't necessarily have to follow each other. It's a feature of poetry commented on by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it's a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously. By the late 19th century, Tagore was already fascinated by the aleatory, associative workings of poetry, and he articulates this in 1895 in his essay on Bengali nursery rhymes; these chharas, or rhymes, he says, subvert logical expectations and rationality to make space for the random. While doing so, he repeatedly uses variations of a phrase, nityaprabahita chetanar majhe (the daily flow of consciousness), which alert us to the fact that he may well have read William James's writings on the "stream of consciousness" in Psychology in 1892. Whether or not that's the case, the essay is certainly the first known instance of the notion of the "stream of consciousness" making its appearance in the literary domain.

Tagore's first name sounded like gobbledegook to Larkin's ears, and Dickens, who met Tagore's grandfather Dwarkanath in London in 1842, had this to say of that name: "I have spelt it backwards, but it makes no less tremendous nonsense that way." But there's a narrative behind the names. "Dwarkanath" means "lord of Dwarka" – Dwarka is Krishna's home; it's another name for Krishna, and is a properly Hindu name. Tagore's father's name, Debendranath, means "lord of the gods", and has a clear religious connotation. "Rabindranath" means "lord of the sun"; it announces a shift from the invocation of the gods in Bengali naming toward names that suggest or contain light or radiance. Debendranath, a prime mover of the unitarian Brahmo Samaj, is, in naming his son (indeed all his sons), moving away from the old, populous Hindu universe to a sphere of immanent illumination: the world of the so-called Bengali "enlightenment". Tagore, early on, was aware of inhabiting a historical moment that made his identity a malleable entity, and something from which he was at one remove. At the time of his marriage in 1883, he sent his friend Priyanath Sen a curious handwritten invitation: "Priya babu – on the auspicious day of the coming Sunday of 24th Aghrayan [Nov/ Dec], my close relative Sriman Rabindranath Thakur will be married at an auspicious hour. We would be grateful if you could join us on that occasion in the evening at No 6 Jorasanko at Debendranath Thakur's house to participate in the wedding celebrations. Yours sincerely, Sri Rabindranath Thakur."

This sense of comical-melancholic estrangement never left him. Late in life, when he began to turn his elaborate manuscript corrections into doodles and visual flourishes, and those flourishes into sui generis, weird paintings, he did some of his most mysterious visual work in the genre of the self-portrait. Among them is a series, oddly prescient, of Warhol's take on celebrity, in which he scribbles on copies of a photograph of himself on a magazine cover, turning one into a feminine likeness, another into a clean-shaven youth, a third to a sea-captain, and a fourth to a prophet. Like Titch Thomas in Larkin's "Sunny Prestatyn", he defaces the picture until he has almost obliterated the famous, but solitary, original.