Postmaster

Rabindranath Tagore

Description

Poet, novelist, painter and musician Rabindranath Tagore created the modern short story in India. Written in the 1890s, during a period of relative isolation, his best stories included in this selection recreate vivid images of life and landscapes. They depict the human condition in its many forms: innocence and childhood; love and loss; the city and the village; the natural and the supernatural. Tagore is India s great Romantic. These stories reflect his profoundly modern, original vision. Translated and introduced by William Radice, this edition includes selected letters, bibliographical notes and a glossary.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351183358
• Langue: English

Extrait

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Selected Short Stories
Translated with an Introduction by
WILLIAM RADICE

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Preface
Introduction
The Living and the Dead
The Postmaster
Profit and Loss
Housewife
Little Master s Return
The Divide
Taraprasanna s Fame
Wealth Surrendered
Skeleton
A Single Night
Fool s Gold
Holiday
Kabuliwallah
The Editor
Punishment
A Problem Solved
Exercise-book
Forbidden Entry
In the Middle of the Night
Unwanted
Elder Sister
Fury Appeased
h kurd
Guest
Wishes Granted
False Hope
Son-sacrifice
The Hungry Stones
Thoughtlessness
The Gift of Sight
Appendix A: Passing Time in the Rain
Appendix B: Letters
Bibliographical Notes
Glossary
Map: The Padma River Area
Tagore s Family Tree
Footnotes
Introduction
Profit and Loss
The Divide
Taraprasanna s Fame
Wealth Surrendered
Fool s Gold
Kabuliwallah
Punishment
A Problem Solved
Exercise-book
Forbidden Entry
Unwanted
Elder Sister
Fury Appeased
h kurd
Guest
Wishes Granted
False Hope
Son-sacrifice
The Hungry Stones
Thoughtlessness
The Gift of Sight
Appendix A: Passing Time in the Rain
Appendix B: Letters
Bibliographical Notes
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
RABINDRANATH TAGORE: SELECTED SHORT STORIES
Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861, into one of the foremost families of Bengal. He was the fourteenth child of Debendranath Tagore, who headed the Brahmo Samaj (a Hindu reform movement). The family house at Jorasanko in Calcutta was a hive of cultural and intellectual activity. Tagore was educated by private tutors, and first visited Europe in 1878. He started writing at an early age, and his talent was recognized by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the leading writer of the day. In the 1890s Tagore lived mainly in rural East Bengal, managing family estates. In the early 1900s he was involved in the svade campaign against the British, but withdrew when the movement turned violent. In 1912 he came to England with Gitanjali , an English translation of some of his religious lyrics. It was acclaimed by W. B. Yeats and later published by Macmillan, leading directly to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. In the 1920s and 1930s he made extensive lecture tours of America, Europe and the Far East. Proceeds from these tours, and from his Western publications, went to Visva-Bharati, the school and international university he created at Santiniketan, a hundred miles north-west of Calcutta.
Tagore was a controversial figure at home and abroad: at home because of his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama and music; abroad because of the stand he took against militarism and nationalism. In 1919 he protested against the Amritsar Massacre by returning the knighthood that the British had given him in 1915. He was close to Mahatma Gandhi, who called him the Great Sentinel of modern India; but he generally held himself aloof from politics. His own translations (Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore , 1936) have not proved sufficient to sustain the worldwide reputation he enjoyed in his lifetime; but as a Bengali writer his eminence is unchallenged. His works run to twenty-nine large volumes. They contain some sixty collections of verse; novels such as Gora and The Home and the World; experimental plays such as The Post Office and Red Oleanders; and essays on a host of religious, social and literary topics. He also wrote over 2,000 songs, which have become the national music of Bengal, and include the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. Late in life he took up painting, exhibiting in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London and New York. He died in 1941.
About the Translator:
William Radice was born in 1951 and went to Westminster School. He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, winning the Newdi-gate Prize for poetry in 1970. He went on to do a Diploma in Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. After working as a psychiatric nurse and a schoolmaster, he returned to Oxford in 1979, researching on the Bengali epic poet Michael Madhusudan Datta for the degree of D.Phil. (1987). In 1985 Penguin published his translation of Tagore s Selected Poems (revised 1987). His other publications include four books of poems, Eight Sections (1974), Strivings (1980), Louring Skies (1985) and The Retreat (1994); a book of children s stories translated from Bengali, The Stupid Tiger and Other Tales (1981); The Translator s Art - Essays in Honour of Betty Radice (Penguin, 1987), which he co-edited with Barbara Reynolds; and Teach Yourself Bengali (1994). He has been given literary awards in West Bengal and Bangladesh and is now Lecturer in Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Preface
This book was conceived as a companion volume to my Selected Poems of Tagore, published by Penguin Books in 1985 and revised in 1987. I originally intended to do for the stories what I tried to do for the poems: select from the full range of Tagore s stories from 1884 to 1941, and write an Introduction that would survey a lifetime of story-writing. I soon realized that this was not practicable: a one-volume selection from over ninety stories would either be too unwieldy or too thin. I also wanted to reach a fair critical assessment of each story before choosing or rejecting it, and it was difficult to do this for so many. It is possible (fairly or unfairly) to skim through a poem to decide whether it might be possible to translate it; this is not so easy with stories, which need to be read carefully from beginning to end.
I also realized that there were other good reasons for limiting my selection to the 1890s, Tagore s most fertile decade as a short-story writer, and that the Introduction could, in explaining these reasons, go more deeply into a particular period of Tagore s life than was possible in my Introduction to Selected Poems. I believe that any book of English translations of Tagore has to introduce him in the sense that it should not assume prior knowledge; but that is not to say that we should be reluctant to move beyond the general portrait to examination of particular phases or aspects of his life and work. The Tagore of this book is a man in his thirties, with a wife and young children, not the majestic sage of later fame.
Selected Poems was designed for the Western English reader. One of the surprises that it brought me was the interest it aroused in India and even in Bengal itself. It is unusual for a translation to provoke controversy and interest among those who have no need for it; but I have come to see that the very special importance that Tagore has for Bengalis, their excellent command of English, and their understandable desire that he should be appreciated and properly understood by outsiders, all combine to make translations of Tagore newsworthy in Bengal in a way that no translation of an English author has ever been - to my knowledge - in Britain. This book, while mainly intended for non-Bengalis, has therefore been done with a sideways glance at Bengali readers and critics. I have given Bengali language sources in my Introduction, and related what I have said quite closely to what I have been able to learn of Bengali criticism of Tagore s stories.
It seems appropriate, now that there are many Bengali speakers living in Britain and other Western countries, to assume a greater communality of interest between Bengali and non-Bengali readers: to refer in a footnote to a book written in Bengali does not seem as academic as it might have done even ten years ago. This is an aspect of the way our societies are changing: Bengal is closer to Britain than ever before - so Tagore is less distant from us than he was. At the same time, the extreme difficulty and challenge of translating and presenting him properly remains. Just because the stranger has become a neighbour does not mean we have to work any less hard to understand him well.
I have used the same system of transliterating Bengali words as I used in Selected Poems. For names of people and places, however, I have gone for commonly accepted spellings with no diacritical marks. It is never easy to indicate Bengali pronunciation by any-system of Romanization. When in doubt, consult a native speaker!
As always I must acknowledge the support of friends. Sujata Chaudhuri, Ranjana Ash and the late Subhendusekhar Mukhopadhyay answered my translation queries (the last named also gave me special help with the notes in Appendix B), and Prasanta Kumar Paul - Tagore s leading contemporary biographer - gave me vital advice while I was working on the Introduction. I must also thank Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for making it possible for me to go to Santiniketan for six weeks in March and April 1989. The Introduction was largely written in Rabindra Bhavana, the most beautiful and civilized library in the world. Finally I should like to thank those at Rajshahi University in Bangladesh, who in 1987 took me by university jeep, and by ferries over the Padma and Gorai rivers, to the still magical place where most of these stories were written, a century ago.
Note on the Revised Edition
But for the kindness, sensitivity and infinite care of my dear friend Arun Deb, I could never have revised and improved the first edition so thoroughly. I cannot thank him enough. I should also like to thank his family and friends, and my many other Bengali friends in India, Bangladesh and Britain, who, despite my shortcomings, have retained their faith in me, and have never failed to encourage me to believe that the works of their greatest poet can be translated.
For any remaining flaws I alone am to blame.
1994
. . . I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world