The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by
himself from Bengali into English, is an event in the history of English
poetry and of world poetry. I do not use these terms with the looseness
of contemporary journalism. Questions of poetic art are serious, not to
be touched upon lightly or in a spirit of bravura.
Bengal is a nation of fifty million people. The great age of Bengali
literature is this age in which we live. And the first Bengali whom I
heard singing the lyrics of Tagore said, as simply as one would say it
is four o'clock, "Yes, we speak of it as the Age of Rabindranath."
The six poems now published were chosen from a hundred lyrics about to
appear in book form. They might just as well have been any other six,
for they do not represent a summit of attainment but an average.
These poems are cast, in the original, in metres perhaps the most
finished and most subtle of any known to us. If you refine the art of
the troubadours, combine it with that of the Pleiade, and add to that
the sound-unit principle of the most advanced artists in _vers libre_,
you would get something like the system of Bengali verse. The sound of
it when spoken is rather like good Greek, for Bengali is daughter of
Sanscrit, which is a kind of uncle or elder brother of the Homeric
idiom.
All this series of a hundred poems are made to music, for "Mr." Tagore
is not only the great poet of Bengal, he is also their great musician.
He teaches his songs, and they are sung throughout Bengal more or less
as the troubadours' songs were sung through Europe in the twelfth
century.
And we feel here in London, I think, much as the people of Petrarch's
time must have felt about the mysterious lost language, the Greek that
was just being restored to Europe after centuries of deprivation. That
Greek was the lamp of our renaissance and its perfections have been the
goal of our endeavor ever since.
I speak with all seriousness when I say that this beginning of our more
intimate intercourse with Bengal is the opening of another period. For
one thing the content of this first brief series of poems will destroy
the popular conception of Buddhism, for we in the Occident are apt to
regard it as a religion negative and anti-Christian.
The Greek gave us humanism; a belief in _mens sana in corpore sano_, a
belief in proportion and balance. The Greek shows us man as the sport of
the gods; the sworn foe of fate and the natural forces. The Bengali
brings to us the pledge of a calm which we need overmuch in an age of
steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation of the fellowship
between man and the gods; between man and nature.
It is all very well to object that this is not the first time we have
had this fellowship proclaimed, but in the arts alone can we find the
inner heart of a people. There is a deeper calm and a deeper conviction
in this eastern expression than we have yet attained. It is by the arts
alone that one people learns to meet another far distant people in
friendship and respect.
I speak with all gravity when I say that world-fellowship is nearer for
the visit of Rabindranath Tagore to London.
_Ezra Pound_