| — The Gardener, 1915 BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE India Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years. |
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| Orange Color Flower |
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| Melastoma - Singapore Rhododendron |
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| Passiflora foetida |
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| Purple Grass Flower |
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| Little White Star Flower |
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| Purple Grass Flower |
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| Purple White Flower |
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| Little white purple flower |
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| Mimosa - The Sensitive Grass |
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| Eichhornia crassipes - The Water Hyacinth |
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| Ipomoea aquatica - KangKung in Indonesian, Malay |
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| Neptunia Plena - Aquatic sensitive plant |
It was the young Japanese who made Rabindranat Tagore known to me.
In 1982, I stayed in the Tibetan Boarding House in Calcutta City. I chose to stay here because this is the cheapest accommodation I could afford in the City. This boarding house happens to be also the favorite accommodation of a constant flow of young Japanese coming to India in search spiritual enlightenment. They are not hippies. They are admirers and followers of Tagore. These I met in the boarding house are those such as University fresh leaver who not yet have a job. (That is why they chose to stay in this cheap accommodation)
We were room mates, we talk to each other. Almost every one told me they came for Rabindaranat Tagore. At that time I knew nothing about Tagore.
“You do not know Rabindranat Tagore?” One young Japanese asked me surprisingly.
“I do not know who he is.” I told him truly.
He gave an introduction of Tagor to me. And told me that Tagore has a school at Shantiniketan Town, Bolpur, today a leading university, Viswabharati. In that school, student study in the open air under the trees.
Study under the trees! That is romantic. I like to pay a visit to the school.
That was only the second days I arrived to India. So I stared my understanding of India through Rabindranat Tagore. And it was the young Japanese who make Rabindranat Tagore know to me.
A week later I made my first train trip in India from Calcutta to Shantiniketan where Tagore’s University is.
Rabindranath Tagore, the poet laureate from Bengal, was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Song Offerings, an English translation of Gitanjali.
Rabindranath Tagore was not only the first Indian, but also the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
Tagore’s original English writings are mostly essays, poetry being his translations of his original Bengali poems.
Two interesting English works of Tagore, Stray Birds
and Fireflies contain poems, both original in Bengali Language and English translations.
Besides Gitanjali (Song Offerings) which earned him the Nobel prize, among his other poetical works in English, all translations. Here is a list of his works:
1- Gitanjali (Song Offerings)
2- The Gardener,
3- The Crescent Moon,
4- Fruit Gathering,
5- Lover’s Gift and Crossing,
6- The Fugitive
7- The Child
“The Child” is the only major poem of Tagore written originally in English and published as a separate book. Tagore was never ambitious to be famous as an English writer. Though he was born into an elite family and well-exposed to Western culture and literature, had visited England twice and had many Europeans as acquaintances and friends, his preference of language for his literary expression had always been his native language, Bengali.
