Customer Reviews

Show Yourself To My Soul

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Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore is a series of poems exposing Tagore's search for union with the divine. Tagore, a Bengali Hindu, writes with great beauty, emotion and simplicity. Reading the poems in order (there are 157 poems, each about a page or less long) shows the waxing and waning cycles of Tagore's spiritual life. Sometimes God is present to Tagore, only to leave later. A Christian spiritual seeker myself, I could easily relate to the pendulum swing that Tagore writes about: the joys, frustrations and patience. Tagore himself made an English translation of these poems for which he won the Nobel prize for literature in the early 20th century (the first non-European to win the literature prize). Here the translation is by a Catholic monk who spent most of his adult life in Bengal, and many scholars think his translation is better than Tagore's, due to his absolute fluency in both languages. I have read beautiful poems by many spiritual writers, and I found Tagore's Gitanjali the most approachable and meaningful. Highest recommendation.

I can't read Bengali so I have no way of knowing how faithful Br. James Talarovic was to Rabindranath Tagore's GITANJALI. I have read other translations, even Tagore's own, and at the very least I can say that Talarovic's ring true; that is to say they put words to the dark nights and twilit days of my spirit. Whether this is because Talarovic is a poet in his own right, or because he gave himself to the Bengali language (see his Bengali for Foreigners: Basic Grammar, Basic Vocabulary With Sentences, Secondary Vocabulary, English-Bengali-Transliteration), Br. James was truly in love with Tagore's soul so much that he translated his GITIMALYA and GITALI as well (although at present only the GITANJALI is in print).

I can't recommend Br. James Talarovic's translation of the GITANJALI enough. Besides the quality of the poetry we are indebted to Talarovic for doing what even Rabindranath Tagore didn't do, which was to translate the entire GITANJALI rather than parts of it. SHOW YOURSELF TO MY SOUL is, for me, as edifying as any translation of Rumi, and -- I would venture to say -- equally as profound.

I read Tagore's translation into English of his Bengali song lyrics back in the 1960s. The way he uses God and Lord in that translation, which I no longer have a copy of, struck me as quite at odds with what he actually meant. He never believed in the Western idea of some objective God controlling the Universe, but only in an experience you either have or have not had, rather what I think Jesus was actually referring to. Having had that experience part-way when I was 11, and Tagore's having had apparently the complete experience when he was 17, his songs seem to me to be his struggle to have the experience again, which it seems he never did. I certainly haven't. This translation gives a somewhat better idea of what Tagore meant. There is a fuller philosophical explanation in the Northrup book "The Meeting of East and West". In my elementary astronomy classes, I usually gave students a choice on the final between a few objective questions or commenting on one or two of Tagore's lyrics as they felt them, which to me is as important as the color-magnitude diagram.