My Reminiscences
Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
A boy in a vast Calcutta house, a school he hated, a first snowfall, a mother's death: Tagore's own account of how a poet's mind is made.
Rabindranath Tagore
1861–1941
Tagore's sentences tend to move at a walking pace, warm and plain, whether he is remembering a Calcutta childhood or speaking to God as though to a lover. My Reminiscences and Gitanjali share that patient, unhurried voice: the memoir follows a boy through a house full of relatives and lessons he resists, while the songs in Gitanjali turn the same tenderness toward longing and devotion. Start with whichever fits your mood, the life remembered or the life addressed.
Feels like tenderness, longing and faith.
Start with My Reminiscences.
He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for a book of poems he had translated himself, having been mostly taught at home.
Grief keeps returning you to the same place, to look for what isn't there.
The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing. Books by Rabindranath Tagore
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore, 1910
Short devotional songs that read like love letters to something unnamed. A way to spend an hour with longing, humility and joy, in English prose the poet shaped himself.
The gardener
Rabindranath Tagore, 1913
Fifty-odd small songs about love, parting, gardens and God, in the plain English prose the poet made himself, from the Bengali originals.
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