Song Offerings

What it is

Song Offerings is a volume of lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore, translated into English prose by Tagore himself, drawing mainly on his Bengali collection Gitanjali plus poems from several other works. It was first published in 1912 by the India Society of London, with a second 1913 edition by Macmillan that added an introduction by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats.

Why it matters

This book made Tagore world-famous in the West and, in 1913, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yeats's enthusiastic introduction helped bring Tagore's work to English readers who knew nothing of Bengali poetry. The book reveals how Tagore reshaped his own poems in translation, sometimes freely rewriting rather than literally translating them.

Look closer

• Why might a poet choose to translate his own work rather than let someone else do it?
• What does Yeats's introduction tell us about how Western readers viewed Indian culture at the time?
• What might be lost or changed when a poem moves from Bengali into English prose?