The Tagore Reader: Gitanjali, Songs of Kabîr, Thought Relics, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, Stray Birds, The Home and the World
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"Collected here are six of Rabindranath Tagore's most important works including Gitanjali, Songs of Kabîr, Thought Relics, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, Stray Birds, and The Home and the World. Tagore was a Bengali poet, Brahmo religionist, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. These land mark works all have a lyrical, rhythmic quality that makes them both accessible and beautiful."
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author, 5; publication, 0
Review Date: January 22, 2010
Reviewer: John Lederman, Stratford, Ontario
How does one rate a book like this?
I came to Tagore's writing many years ago and at that time found a hardcover edition of "Collected Poems and Plays". Tagore's writing is absolutely exquisite, spiritual, insightful, singing, deeply moving. The kind of wisdom about humanity that one re-visits, re-reads at many different stages of one's life. How can one not like things like:
"I have scaled the peak and found no shelter in fame's bleak and barren height. Lead me, my Guide, before the light fades, into the valley of quiet where life's harvest mellows into golden wisdom." (Stray Birds # 320)
Author's writing: five out of five.
But that's not all there is to a book. There is, in this case, translation, and then book design.
Who translated is not noted. The translation here is identical to my very old copy. It sings and has a flow which is a good combination of contemporary language usage and the formalism of "thees" and "thous" which to me gives it a sense of the sacred of an older established text. Note that the titles of Kabir's Poems remain untranslated for some nonsensical or lazy reason.
Where this book is appalling is in the design and presentation. In this edition (white cover, purple border includes Gitanjali, Songs of Kabir, Sadhana, Stray Birds, The Home and the World) there is no real table of contents. Oh, on the first title page, which is also the copyright page, is a list of these titles... with no page numbers to find them in the book. Gitanjali another exquisite piece, a long ode to his guide, his inspiration, his 'god,' in my old hardcover edition is 48 pages and divided into 103 stanzas (numbered). In this edition it is 32 unrelenting pages with no divisions and no stanzas. Perhaps, for some, an interesting way to read it, just ploughing through from one end to the other, but there is so much here to stop on and contemplate along the way, each stanza benefits from the little oasis of a break to contemplate what has just entered you through the writing. Again, translation identical word for word between this text and my old one.
In this book you will find at least five, yes five, very different font sizes throughout. I'm not talking about headings, titles, but simply the body text in different sections of the book. No rhyme or reason to it.
So how does one rate a book like this? In this age where written material can be digitized and cranked out on any printer, presentation and editing are too often neglected to the detriment of the author's material. While Tagore's material deserves a five, the lack of quality of this publication deserves zero.
Reading Tagore is enormously rewarding. But look around, find a better edition, although that may not be easy. The only other editions I found at the time of this writing are also woefully inadequate about informing what is actually between their covers. I have discovered through this and a few other publication beyond their initial fifty year copyrights, that a lot of not very careful or scrupulous printers just lift material from wherever they can (frequently the Gutenburg Project) and crank it out for no other reason than to profit from any old poor presentation of a book which should not even be put up for sale.
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author, 5; publication, 0