Gitanjali

1Sisir Kumar Das in his edition of The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume One: Poems (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1994), Notes, p. 602 finds four differences between the India Society edition of 1912 and the Macmillan edition of 1913: India Society Macmillan Poem 30

my Lord

my lord Poem 51

Someone has said Some one has said (fifth paragraph) Poem 52

shy and soft demeanour

coyness and sweetness of demeanour Poem 87

my Lord

my lord Swapan Majumdar, in his bilingual edition of Gitanjali (Rabindra- Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, 1999), Granthaparichay, p. 266, notes two places in the India Society edition where, in Yeats’s Introduction, lines quoted from the poems are slightly different from how they are in the text: ‘And because I have loved this life …’ instead of ‘And because I love this life …’ (No. 95), and ‘entering my heart unbidden as one of the common crowd …’ instead of ‘entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd …’ (No. 43). These discrepancies were rectified in the Macmillan edition. He also finds that five poems were missing from the Index in the India Society edition. In noting these differences ‘apart from punctuation’, he also implies that there are some punctuation differences. I have not been able to compare the two editions minutely, but so far as I can see punctuation and paragraphing are exactly the same. 1 See, for example, Warwick Gould, ‘W.B. Yeats on the road to St Martin’s Street, 1900–17’ in Elizabeth James (ed.), Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2002). On pp. 198–201 of this essay Gould describes Yeats’s unsucessful attempts to get Sir Frederick Macmillan to add to Tagore’s next book ‘a short essay on his prosody’ to ‘remind readers and reviewers that they were reading translations of poems, which in the original had very exact and difficult forms, & not the work of a facile mind, choosing the easiest form.’

1 The allusion is to lines 248–50 in ‘Peter Bell’: A primrose by a river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more. 2 As in Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’. 3 ‘artisan people’. * The only rudeness I have ever suffered from Indians was from two in the retinue of a minor rajah, who having been to the West, seemed to have suffered badly from association with the poorest manners there. 4 Laurence Housman (1865–1959), novelist and dramatist, younger brother of A.E. Housman. 5 = paras (localities). 6 It now takes two and a half hours by train but still about four hours by (fast, modern) road, so Rattray did well to drive there in five hours. 7 The poem is set out somewhat differently in the VBQ text of Rattray’s article, but as I don’t know if this was his doing or the editors’, I have given the standard layout with the rogue question marks, and the capital letters on ‘Lord’ and ‘Life’ that Rattray gives. * It is the 1914 Macmillan edition. The sketch-portrait was done by Rothenstein in 1912. I do not know of any other correct version of this particular song. There cannot be many (if any) so corrected. * This rendering is from ‘Isaiah: A cosmic drama’: J. Todd Ferrier: The Order of the Cross, London.

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