Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 7, 1861 in Calcutta, India. He attended University College, at London for one year before being called back to India by his father in 1880. During the first 51 years of his life, he achieved some success in the Calcutta area of India with his many stories, songs, and plays. His short stories were published monthly in a friend's magazine and he played the lead role in a few of the public performances of his plays. While returning to England in 1912, he began translating his latest selections of poems, Gitanjali, into English. It was published in September 1912 in a limited edition by the India Society in London. In 1913, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. He was the first non-westerner to receive the honor. In 1915, he was knighted by King George V, but Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919 following the Amritsar massacre of 400 Indian demonstrators by British troops. He primarily worked in Bengali, but after his success with Gitanjali, he translated many of his other works into English. He wrote over one thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; almost two dozen plays and play-lets; eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. He also composed more than two thousand songs, both the music and lyrics. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. He died on August 7, 1941 at the age of 80.
<p>"A Bengali poet and mystic, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) had long been loved and admired in India, but it was not until the publication of his own English translation of more than a hundred of his Bengali poems in 1913 that he achieved international fame — and a Nobel Prize.</p><p>Comprised of moving, heartfelt prose poems reminiscent of Blake and Gibran — many almost biblical in their rhythms, phrasings, and images — Gitanjali (Song Offerings) was inspired by medieval Indian lyrics of devotion in which the principal subject is love, through some poems detail the internal conflict between spiritual longings and earthly desires, and others depict images drawn from nature.</p><p>In his introduction to this translation, William Butler Yeats writes: ""I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me."" This new edition is sure to earn Tagore a broad new following."</p><div><br></div>
