Gitanjali biography

But, although these transfers in the prose of Rabindranate Tagore excited me, as nothing worried me for many years, I will not know anything about his life or about the movements of thoughts that caused these songs if any traveling Indian does not tell me about them. It must have seemed quite natural to my interlocutor that I was shocked because he replied: - I read Rabindranata every day; Reading one line from it means to forget about all the sorrows of this world.

“I said:“ If the Englishman who lived in London in the reign of Richard II showed a translation from Petrarch or Dante, he would not find books that could answer him questions, but would ask some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant, just as I asked you. As far as I understand, this poetry is so full of so simple; A new Renaissance was born in your country, and I will never know about it otherwise than firsthand.

He replied: - We have other poets, but there is not one that would be equal to him; We call our time of the era of Rabindranate. It seems to me that not a single poet in Europe is famous as he is famous among us.

He is as great in music as in poetry and his songs from the west of India to Burma itself, wherever they only speak in the Bengal dialect. He was already famous at nineteen years when he wrote his first story, and the plays written by him when he was only a little older is put in Calcutta. I admire the fullness of his life so much; When he was very young, he wrote a lot about the phenomena of nature; He spent whole days in his garden; In the interval between the twenty -fifth, approximately, and the thirty -fifth year of life, when a great grief befell him, he created the most beautiful poetry of love in our language.

And then the doctor added with deep excitement: - In any words, I could not express to me what I owed at the seventeen years of this love poetry. Subsequently, his art became deeper, became religious and philosophical; All the aspirations of mankind are invested in its hymns. He was the first of our saints did not refuse to live, but speaks on behalf of life itself; That is why we bring him our love.

I could distort his exquisite expressions in my memory, but not his thought. Other Hindus began to visit me, and their admiration for this person sounded so strange in our world, where the great and small we hide under the same cover of obvious comedy and semi -servant neglect. When we built our cathedrals, did we have the same worship of our great people? His father, the magician Rishi, sometimes sat like this until the next day; Once, on the river, he fell into contemplation of the beauty of the landscape, and the rowers waited eight hours of order to take up the oars again.

He then told me about the Tagore family and how great people came out of her cradle for several generations. Squirrels jump from the branches and climb on his knees, and the birds sit in his arms. In the thoughts of these people, I notice such a flair and understanding of visible beauty, as if they adhered to Nietzsche doctrines that we should believe only in such moral or intellectual beauty, which sooner or later is imprinted on physical objects.

I said: - You, people of the East, know how to maintain family glory. The other day, the caretaker of one museum drew my attention to the small black man who tidied Chinese engravings in order, and said: "This is the hereditary expert in Mikado; he takes this position in his family." My interlocutor replied: - When Rabindranat was a boy, he was entirely surrounded in his house with literature and music.

I thought about internal wealth, about the simplicity of these poems, and said: - How many propaganda literature in your country, are there a lot of criticism? We have so much business, especially in my country, that little by little our minds cease to create, and we can not do anything. If our life would not be a constant struggle, we would have lost taste, we would not know that well, we would not find listeners and readers.

The four fifths of our energy go to the fight against a bad taste in our own mind or in the mind of others. "We go around the villages, tell long mythological poems that are shifted in the Middle Ages from the Sanskrit language, and often insert teachings in them that they must fulfill their duty.