Gitanjali Introduction

The Bengali Gitanjali is only one of ten volumes of Tagore’s Bengali lyrics from which the poems for the English Gitanjali: Song-Offerings were selected for translation. This Gitanjali which is translated as “Song offering” is a collection of 103 English prose poems written by Rabindranath Tagore and published in 1912. This translation was published with an introduction by William Butler Yeats. The central theme of the poems is devotion and its motto is ‘I am here to sing thee song’ also he composed music for all these lyrics. The original collection of 156/157 poems in Bengali was published on August 14, 1910 which introduced a period of intensive song-writing that is now called Tagore’s Gitanjali Period. Moreover, Gitanjali is the book of the old lover who is in love with heavenly desire. He cannot be satisfied, but must always wish to transcend life and sensation through death, and attain not Nirvana in the sense of extinction, but Brahma Vihara, the joy eternal. The devotional theme in Gitanjali is a gentler modulation from the religious strain in Naibedya, separated from the contexts of patriotic urgency. The devotional attitude are coloured by Tagore’s restlessness in 1910, in his semi-seclusion at Santiniketan. The translation of this poems in English was well received in the West and was widely translated.