7
votes
Accepted
What is the significance of "southern" in Tagore's poem "A Hundred Years From Now"?
tl;dr
Geography.
Deets
The door and the wind are southern because of the tilt of the earth's axis. No, really.
Bengal is a bit north of the Tropic of Cancer. So the sun is always in the south and ...
- 22.1k
6
votes
Accepted
What is the Persian story that Rabindranath Tagore summarises in a letter from June 1894?
This story is "The History of Chec Chahabeddin," first printed in an anonymous 1708 volume called Turkish Tales. The full title of the book reads:
Turkiſh Tales; Conſiſting of ſeveral ...
- 22.1k
6
votes
Accepted
What are the lines in the Bhagavad Gita that Sandip is alluding to?
tl;dr
Bhagavad Geeta 2:47
Source of Sandip's allusion
The passage Sandip alludes to is indeed from the Bhagavad Geeta. The exact source is Chapter 2, verse 47:
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
मा ...
- 22.1k
6
votes
Accepted
What language was Tagore's "This Dog" written in?
Golly.
It's not Hindi at all. It's Bengali. Those languages are as different as Spanish and Italian. They don't even look the same, because they use very distinct, albeit related, scripts.
Bengali, ...
- 22.1k
6
votes
Is Rabindranth Tagore talking about the actual wave nature of light here in Gitanjali?
tl;dr
No.
Deets
Tagore was interested in science, and even arranged to meet Einstein in 1930. So it is tempting to speculate that Tagore had the wave nature of light in mind when he wrote in Poem 57 ...
- 22.1k
5
votes
What does "raised waves in my mind" mean in Tagore's "At the End of the Day"?
tl;dr
The poet's asking, "What is the meaning of life?"
Deets
Kumud Biswas's translation of জানি গো, দিন যাবে এ দিন যাবে / jaani go, din jaabe e din jaabe strikes me as a bit inept. Bengali ...
- 22.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Why was the narrator left alone on the shore in Tagore's "Sonar Tari"?
Literally, there's no room left in the boat after the paddy is loaded, so the paddy cutter can't get on board. As for what that means metaphorically, there's no one answer. Here are some possibilities....
- 22.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Why would the indigo factory's steward be a messenger of death?
In Hindu mythology, the god of death is Yama. His attendants are called yamaduut, literally Yama's messengers (duut). The Bengali original of ছেলেবেলা / chhelebelaa uses the phrase যমের দূত / yamer ...
- 22.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Why does the narrator in Tagore's story call the Cabuliwallah's daughter "Parbati"?
The Sanskrit word for mountain is parvat. Pārvati is a patronymic meaning "the daughter of the mountains". Such patronymics are very common in Indian mythology. For example, Sītā, the ...
- 22.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Who classified Rabindranath Tagore's lyrics into the six standard categories?
The English-language Wikipedia is wrong. The classification was Tagore's own.
The Bengali-language Wikipedia entry for গীতবিতান / giitabitaan says:
১৯৩১ সালে (আশ্বিন, ১৩৩৮ বঙ্গাব্দ) এই গ্রন্থের প্রথম ...
- 22.1k
5
votes
Accepted
How good was Rabindranath Tagore's English, in general?
tl;dr
It was fine for ordinary conversation and non-creative writing, but perhaps not good enough to capture the expressivity of his Bengali originals.
Deets
Tagore was curiously diffident about his ...
- 22.1k
4
votes
Accepted
What song is mai chhoro brajaki basari?
tl;dr
The line of the song quoted is too fragmentary to identify the song with any specificity, at least not without some fairly intensive research. But it's evidently a song about Krishna.
Deets
In ...
- 22.1k
4
votes
Accepted
What is the original source of Rabindranath Tagore's "Endless Time"?
tl;dr
হে রাজেন্দ্র, তব হাতে কাল অন্তহীন (he raajendra, taba haathe kaal antahiin), poem 39 from Tagore's 1901 collection নৈবেদ্য (naibedya)
Deets
"Endless Time" appears as Poem 82 in ...
- 22.1k
4
votes
Accepted
When did Tagore write "The Victory"?
tl;dr
October/November 1892
Deets
The Bengali original of "The Victory", জয় পরাজয় (jay paraajay, "Victory and Defeat") appears in the first volume of a multi-volume collection ...
- 22.1k
4
votes
Accepted
What are the originals of the poems Tagore has translated from English into Bengali?
I was able to identify many of the poems, using Google and Bing translate and searching for keywords these gave me. Using Google books, I further identified two anthologies which contain several of ...
- 11.7k
4
votes
In Tagore's "Along the Way", who is the entity that the "your touch" is referring to?
The page you link to calls this a "devotional song", suggesting that it's religious and that the entity "touching" the narrator is God. This makes sense as an interpretation of the ...
- 71.1k
4
votes
Why do the prayers stop in Tagore's "A Dream"?
The narrator dreams of a visit to the ancient city of Ujjayani, on the banks of the Kshipra river. Ujjayani was the capital of the Avanti kingdom that flourished roughly 700 BCE–300 BCE. The Mahakal ...
- 22.1k
3
votes
Who is Tagore's "Cruel Kindness" addressed to?
The addressee of the poem is God. The somewhat timid translation obscures this, but it's pretty clear in the original Bengali.
As Kumud Biswas's note to her translation says, the original of "...
- 22.1k
3
votes
Does Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Vishabriksha have a special meaning in Tagore's Chokher Bali?
tl;dr
Tagore's progressive take on the plight of widows rebukes Chatterjee's retrograde portrayal of widow remarriage.
Introduction
Like Rabindranath Tagore's চোখের বালি / chokher baali "A Speck ...
- 22.1k
2
votes
What is the original source of Rabindranath Tagore's "Endless Time"?
Rabindranath Tagore translated some of his own devotional poetry into English, and it was published in 1910 in an English book called Gitanjali: Song Offerings. This translation of Endless Time comes ...
- 11.7k
2
votes
Why does the narrator in Tagore's story call the Cabuliwallah's daughter "Parbati"?
'Cabuliwallah' is a beloved tale of love and loss and nostaligia for a cessation of time. But time moves on relentlessly and leaves in its wake, heartbreak and human efforts to reconcile with this ...
2
votes
What are the Bengali original texts of the poems which Tagore has translated in Stray birds?
Whether the pieces in Stray Birds (1916) can rightly be called poems is debatable. There are indeed a couple of (very) brief poems, such as the one cited in the question. But four lines is as long as ...
- 22.1k
1
vote
Who to contact to amend Tagore's Jana Gana Mana?
Given its role as a national anthem, presumably a national political process can be followed to amend its lyrics. That doesn't change what Tagore wrote, but it changes the anthem. For comparison, ...
- 1,451
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible