TAGORE, Rabindranath. Gitanjali (Song Offerings) … A Collection of Prose Translations made by the Author from the original Bengali. With an Introduction by W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan. 1913.
8vo. Original publisher's cloth, lettered and ruled in gilt; pp. xxii, 101, [2, advertisements], frontispiece portrait by William Rothenstein (to whom the book is dedicated in print); spine a little faded, boards with minor spotting; preliminaries with offsetting from paste-downs, final advertisement leaf attached to fly-leaf near gutter (binder's mistake); a good copy of an uncommon work.
First published in a very limited edition by the India Society in 1912, this is a later printing (first, the same year) of the first trade edition of the book which triggered the decision to award Tagore the Nobel Prize for literature, the first to go to a non-European writer. The fellow writer William Butler Yeats expressed his admiration in the long preface. 'No poet seems to me as famous in Europe he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burmah wherever Bengali is spoken' (p. viii). All three men, the painter and writer on art William Rothenstein, who had visited India in 1910, the Irish writer Yeats, and Tagore knew and supported each other in London in 1912.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941), was a Bengali polymath who was pivotal in the reshaping of Bengali literature and music. He was a poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, short story writer, painter, singer, musician, actor, mystic, aesthetic thinker, and social reformer, and was given the titles of ‘Great Sentinel’ and ‘Gurudev’ by Gandhi.
#2122399