Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

BENGALI POET

WRITTEN BY: 

• W. Andrew Robinson

LAST UPDATED: Aug 3, 2019 See Article History

Alternative Title: Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur

Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur, (born May 7, 1861,

Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died August 7, 1941, Calcutta), Bengali poet,

short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who introduced

new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali

literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He

was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and

he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century

India. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for

Literature.

The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early began to write

verses, and, after incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to

India. There he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed

Manasi (1890), a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains

some of his best-known poems, including many in verse forms new to Bengali, as

well as some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis.

In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s

estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a

houseboat on the Padma River(the main channel of the Ganges River), in close

contact with village folk, and his sympathy for them became the keynote of much

of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine “humble lives

and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy, laced with

gentle irony, that is unique to him (though admirably captured by the director

Satyajit Ray in later film adaptations). Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside,

most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these

years he published several poetry collections, notably Sonar Tari (1894; The

Golden Boat), and plays, notably Chitrangada (1892; Chitra). Tagore’s poems are

virtually untranslatable, as are his more than 2,000 songs, which achieved

considerable popularity among all classes of Bengali society.

Rabindranath Tagore.

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at

Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the

Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the school, which

became Visva-Bharati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising from the

deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in

his later poetry, which was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (Song

Offerings) (1912). This book, containing Tagore’s English prose translations of

religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, including

Gitanjali (1910), was hailed by W.B. Yeats and André Gide and won him the

Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated

it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre.

From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing and reading from his

work in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia and becoming an eloquent

spokesperson for the cause of Indian independence. Tagore’s novels in Bengali

are less well known than his poems and short stories; they include Gora (1910)

and Ghare-Baire (1916), translated into English as Gora and The Home and the

World, respectively. In the late 1920s, when he was in his 60s, Tagore took up

painting and produced works that won him a place among India’s foremost

contemporary artists.

W. Andrew Robinson

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rabindranath-Tagore

Motivo de la elección: En uno de los textos que trabajamos en el curso se hizo referencia a Rabindranath Tagore, de forma muy escueta, pero suficiente para que la teacher nos dijera una frase de él muy bonita. La reproduzco aquí: Yo dormía y soñé que la vida era alegría. Me desperté y vi que la vida era servicio. Serví y comprendí que el servicio era alegría. 

Esta frase algo tiene que ver con la docencia, sin dudas, pero más aún con la vida misma.

¿Qué decir de él? Recibió el premio nobel, pero no creo que los reconocimientos hayan tenido un lugar preponderante en su vida.

PD: Por fin entendí de donde venía el segundo nombre de Óscar, mi vecino...Óscar Rabindranath, pero Silva, no Tagore. 

Estudiante: Carlos García.