Rabindranath Tagore

Gitanjali Rabindranath Tagore

Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the book. It is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Its central theme is devotion & motto is 'I am here to sing thee songs.

The original Bengali collection of 156/157 poems was published on August 14, 1910. The English Gitanjali or Song Offerings is a collection of 103 English poems of Tagore's own English translations of his Bengali poems first published in November 1912 by the Indian Society of London. It contained translations of 53 poems from the original Bengali Gitanjali, as well as 50 other poems which were from his drama Achalayatan and eight other books of poetry -- mainly Gitimalya (17 poems), Naivedya (15 poems) and Kheya (11 poems).

The translations were often radical, leaving out or altering large chunks of the poem and in one instance fusing two separate poems (song 95, which unifies songs 89,90 of Naivedya). Tagore undertook the translations prior to a visit to England in 1912, where the poems were extremely well received. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the English Gitanjali.

The English Gitanjali became popular in the West, and was widely translated. The word gitanjali is composed from "geet", song, and "anjali", offering, and thus means - "An offering of songs"; but the word for offering, anjali, has a strong devotional connotation, so the title may also be interpreted as "prayer offering of song".

William Butler Yeats wrote the introduction to the first edition of Gitanjali.