Gitanjali

Gitanjali

Sign up to track reviews and ratings

Read by: Michael Fitzpatrick

Language: English

Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes

Publisher: MuseumAudiobooks.com

Release date: 2019-10-07

Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the poet, polymath, musician, and artist Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who modernised Bengali literature and Indian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tagore is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal". First published in 1912, the English Gitanjali or Song Offerings is a collection of Tagore's own English translations of his Bengali poems. It comprised translations of poems from the original Bengali Gitanjali, as well as poems drawn from his other books of poetry like Gitimalya, Naivedya, and Kheya and from his drama Achalayatan.

Many of the translations are indirect, altering, or omitting large parts of the poem or fusing two separate poems. In 1913, Tagore was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, mainly for the English Gitanjali. The compound word "gitanjali" literally means "song offering" but the part meaning offering, "anjali" has a devotional undertone, so the title may also be rendered as "hymn offering".