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Gitanjali, or Song Offerings, is a collection of poems translated by the author, Rabindranath Tagore, from the original Bengali. This collection won Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He was the first Asian to win the honour. These poems are primarily devotional, with mystic aura and sublimated ecstasy. They are the thoughts of a seer; the perfect union of beauty and truth in poetry from the pen of the greatest poet of modern India. While introducing this small volume to the West, W. B. Yeats wrote: "Though the work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion and carried back again to the multitude the thoughts of the scholar and of the noble."
About the author
Rabindranath Tagore (7th May 1861 - 7th August 1941) was an iconic figure in the Indian cultural renaissance. He was a polymath poet, philosopher, musician, writer, and educationist. Rabindranath Tagore became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his collection of poems, Gitanjali. He was called Gurudev, Kaviguru, and Biswakabi affectionately and his songs are popularly known as Rabindra Sangeet.Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was, first of all, a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are:Manasi (1890) (The Ideal One), Sonar Tari (1894) (The Golden Boat), Gitanjali (1910) (Song Offerings), Gitimalya (1914) (Wreath of Songs), and Balaka (1916) (The Flight of Cranes).The English renderings of his poetry, which include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and The Fugitive (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali.Tagore's major plays are Raja (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber], Dakghar (1912) [The Post Office], Achalayatan (1912) [The Immovable], Muktadhara (1922) [The Waterfall], and Raktakaravi (1926) [Red Oleanders].He is the author of several volumes of short stories and many novels, among them Gora (1910), Ghare-Baire (1916) [The Home and the World], and Yogayog (1929) [Crosscurrents].Besides these, he wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies, one in his middle years and the other shortly before his death in 1941. Tagore also left numerous drawings and paintings, and songs for which he wrote the music himself.He also played the title role in his first original dramatic piece- Valmiki Pratibha.
