 
Thákurova ulice,
Prague.
|
 
Tagore Room, Sardar Patel Memorial,
Ahmedabad.
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Every year, many events pay tribute to
Tagore: Kabipranam, his birth anniversary, is celebrated by groups
scattered across the globe; the annual Tagore Festival held in Urbana, Illinois
(USA); Rabindra Path Parikrama walking pilgrimages from
Kolkata to Santiniketan; and recitals of his poetry, which are held on important
anniversaries.[74][175][176] Bengali culture is
fraught with this legacy: from language and arts to history and politics. Amartya Sen deemed
Tagore a "towering figure", a "deeply relevant and many-sided
contemporary thinker".[176] Tagore's Bengali
originals—the 1939 Rabīndra Rachanāvalī—is canonised as one of his
nation's greatest cultural treasures, and he was roped into a reasonably humble
role: "the greatest poet India has produced".[177]
Who
are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
“
”
Tagore was renowned throughout much of Europe, North America,
and East Asia.
He co-foundedDartington Hall School, a progressive
coeducational institution;[179] in Japan, he
influenced such figures as Nobel laureate Yasunari
Kawabata.[180] Tagore's works were
widely translated into English, Dutch, German, Spanish, and other European
languages by Czech indologist Vincenc Lesný,[181] French Nobel
laureate André Gide, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova,[182] former Turkish
Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit,[183] and others. In the
United States, Tagore's lecturing circuits, particularly those of 1916–1917,
were widely attended and wildly acclaimed. Some controversies[h] involving Tagore,
possibly fictive, trashed his popularity and sales in Japan and North America
after the late 1920s, concluding with his "near total eclipse"
outside Bengal.[6] Yet a latent
reverence of Tagore was discovered by an astonishedSalman Rushdie during
a trip to Nicaragua.[189]
By way of translations, Tagore influenced
Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral;
Mexican writerOctavio Paz; and Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset, Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the period 1914–1922,
the Jiménez-Camprubí pair produced twenty-two Spanish translations of Tagore's
English corpus; they heavily revised The Crescent Moon and
other key titles. In these years, Jiménez developed "naked poetry".[190] Ortega y Gasset
wrote that "Tagore's wide appeal [owes to how] he speaks of longings for
perfection that we all have [...] Tagore awakens a dormant sense of
childish wonder, and he saturates the air with all kinds of enchanting promises
for the reader, who [...] pays little attention to the deeper import of
Oriental mysticism". Tagore's works circulated in free editions around
1920—alongside those of Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, and Tolstoy.
Rabindranath Tagore's
bust at St Stephen Green Park, Dublin, Ireland
Tagore was deemed over-rated by some. Graham Greene doubted
that "anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously."
Several prominent Western admirers—including Pound and, to a lesser extent,
even Yeats—criticised Tagore's work. Yeats, unimpressed with his English
translations, railed against that "Damn Tagore [...] We got out three
good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then, because he thought it more important
to know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and
wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows
English."[6][191] William Radice,
who "English[ed]" his poems, asked: "What is their place in
world literature?"[192]He saw him as "kind
of counter-cultur[al]", bearing "a new kind of classicism" that
would heal the "collapsed romantic confusion and chaos of the 20th
[c]entury."[191][193] The translated
Tagore was "almost nonsensical",[194] and subpar English
offerings reduced his trans-national appeal:
Anyone who knows Tagore's
poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with any of the
translations (made with or without Yeats's help). Even the translations of his
prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion. E.M. Forster noted [of]The
Home and the World [that] '[t]he theme is so beautiful,' but the
charms have 'vanished in translation,' or perhaps 'in an experiment that has
not quite come off.'
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