Bengali is the seventh most popular language in terms of the number who use it, but few have made the journey from the West to its cultural or spiritual interior. Its
intellectual tradition is without equal in present-day India. Tagore, a true Renaissance man, is its greatestwriter. Joe Winter writes in his Introduction:

Rabindranath Tagore saw himself – knew himself – as a poet, though he was much besides: a prose-writer, painter, social activist and reformer; a patriot and an internationalist; a family man, a solitary; a public and private individual at once diffident in himself and charged with an expressive power.

There was a necessary explicitness to his life that given its concerns was to leave a record of incalculable significance. One may turn to the prose, the plays, the short stories and novels, essays and lectures, to the paintings or to the letters or to the panoramic life itself, and learn much. The wild garden of the imagination, the practical vision, the edge to the intellect, the warmth of the man, can lead one to see with his eyes.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize in 1913, largely on the strength of his own prose versions of poems, greatly admired by W.B.Yeats. Among writers who have translated his work are Gide, Neruda, Pasternak and Akhmatova. His world tours featured debates with figures as diverse as his friend and admirer Gandhi,
Einstein, Pound and H.G.Wells. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are Tagore’s own compositions. His songs are sung in all Bengali-speaking parts.

The translator: Born in 1943, Joe Winter taught English in London schools before taking early retirement. He lived in Calcutta from 1994 to 2006 when he moved back to Britain with his Bengali wife. Anvil has published his
poetry Guest and Host, 2003) and his highly successful translations from Bengali. These include two volumes of poetry by Jibanananda Das, most recently Bengal the Beautiful; Tagore’s Gitanjali (as Song Offerings) and Atmaparichay, six essays (as Of Myself, co-translated with Devadatta Joardar). He received the Tagore Institute of Calcutta’s 2006 award for the propagation of Tagore’s work. He now teaches in Brighton.

'[Joe Winter] reveals a number of Tagore themes: that of India herself, her traditions, her mysteries and her struggles, Nature and the relationship between humanity and Mother Earth, and love in its romantic, spiritual and magical forms.' - David Cadman, Resurgence 254