(This is the second and last part of an article in memory of Tagore. The first part appeared yesterday. The author [www.sudeepsen.net] is a major new generation voice in world literature, and is currently an international writer-in-residence at the Shanghai Writers Association. He was international writer-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh) & visiting scholar at Harvard University. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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MY five years living and writing in Bangladesh, in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, significantly enhanced my latent appreciation for Rabindranath Tagore.

There I encountered Tagore as an everyday cultural idea, a living metaphor - unpretentious, earthy, and accessible.

It was such a pleasure to wake up in Dhaka and spend the entire day not having to utter a single word of English or Hindi, and only be immersed in the linguistic cadence and rhythms of Bangla.

English as a tongue - except for the limited rarefied upper class - was almost entirely irrelevant and redundant, and thankfully so.

In Bangladesh, I found renewed admiration and love for Tagore's music and poetry, largely through hearing his songs sung and his poetry recited by highly skilled and established singers and actors.

While in Dhaka, I translated three full-length books of selected poems by three Bangladeshi poets, wrote and choreographed a large-format literary coffee-table book titled "Postcards from Bangladesh," edited The British Council "Book of Emerging English Poets from Bangladesh," co-founded and co-edited Six Seasons Review, wrote several critical introductions and blurbs for books by local authors, and the Bengali editions of my own books - "Rain/Barsha," and "A Blank Letter/Ekti Khali Chithi"- were also published there.

I closely worked with Bengali poets, writers, academic, singers, artists, actors and lovers of Bengali culture, including of course Tagore's.

So my mature engagement with the Bengali language, literature and culture, including my new-found appreciation for Rabindranath, was carried back to my home city of Delhi - completing a lovely unexpected arc.

This osmotic presence of Tagore as the intimate "other" - quite unbeknown to me - took root in its translucent avatar, widening the tonal registers of my poetic scales.

In the slow-churning growth in my own artistic practice from analogue to digital, from vinyl to CD, from mono to stereo to 5.1 and 7.1, I am quite sure upon reflection that Tagore played his subtle part, sonically and textually.

To further illustrate the context of my early upbringing, background, and where Tagore - then and now - fits in my life as a writer and an artist, let me quote part of the introduction from my fledgling book of poems, "Leaning Against the Lamp-Post," which was first published as a limited edition in 1983 in New Delhi, and then later in 1996 in the United States by Triad/University of South Carolina:

"My parents and grandparents introduced me to the world of poetry. They would recite the great Bengali poets: Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, and Kazi Nazrul Islam; also Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics and the Victorians. I came to learn many of them by heart. In school and college, I explored Hindi and Urdu poetry, discovered the Russians, Latin Americans, as well as Japanese and Chinese verse. Some of my favorite poets included Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Irina Ratushinskaya, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Basho, Li Bai, and many more. My mesho [uncle] - through the now out-of-print precious Penguin Modern European Poets volumes edited by Al Alvares - opened to me a wondrous window, a hitherto unsighted world of modern European poets: Vasko Popa, Guillaume Apollinaire, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, and so many others. Also the Metaphysical Poets and the French Symbolists, in particular Donne, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Verlaine, fascinated me. Of course, growing up in the seventies, one could not miss Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The congregation grew and grew, and through quiet osmosis, I was seduced into the world of sound, rhythm, word-patterns, ideas, syllabics, music, and language itself...."

The direct influence of Tagore on my own work can be best seen in my two books "Rain" and "Postcards from Bangladesh."

"Rain" is landscaped in the two Bengals - West Bengal and Bangladesh - and contains an evocative series of prose poems structured in three mock-sonnet sections, "The First Octet," "The Second Octet," and "The Only Sestet." Setting up the tone in the prologue that acts as an alaap [introduction], the volume importantly opens with a quote from Tagore:



In the lap of the storm clouds - the rain comes -

Its hair loosened, its sari borders flying!



"Postcards from Bangladesh" by virtue of its content contains many resonances of Rabindranath - among others, a piece on Tagore's house "Shilaidaha Kuthibari" in Kushtia on the banks of the River Gorai. Here, he stayed many days at a time composing poetry and songs and writing his novel, "Gora."

About seven or eight years ago, prompted by the fact that I was introducing my son Aria to the poetries and music of different cultures including Bengali, I realized that the children's verse written by Tagore - as available in limited English translation - appeared stilted, staccato and academic.

Also, the quirky-fun-witty aspects of the Tagore poems as those that appear in "Khapcharra/Out of Sync" were not adequately explored in those limited translations.

It is first the joyful abandon and immediate emotional connect that has always attracted me to the best of poetry. It is much later after several readings of a poem that I tend to savor the poem's subtle content, context, cadence, and craft.

I found the former mostly missing in the available translations of Tagore's children and humorous poetry that I had laid my hands upon until then.

So with the assistance of my baba [father], I started translating Rabindranath's wonderfully illustrated volume of nonsense verse, "Khapcharra."

The "Visva-Bharati Santiniketan" hardback edition which I still possess, with its jute-colored cover-weave, is priceless. Surprisingly, this book has not yet been fully translated - considering Tagore tends to be among the first Indian writers on the list of publishers' translation series or academics' priorities in the field of translation studies (vis-a-vis Indian literature of course).

Hopefully, my now ailing father and I will be able to complete the translation of this entire book for publication in the near future.

Translating the complex rhythms and clever rhymes of the Khapcharra poems have been a particular challenge. In some cases, when I transposed the Bengali rhymes onto English, they tended to hit a flawed tonal register and sounded awkward in modern English diction.

When I left out the rhymes altogether, then of course one missed out on the wicked-atonal-musicality and wit, at least to a certain extent.

At the end however, I decided to dispense with the end-rhymes but kept the internal rhythms alive and reasonably true. This is because I wanted Tagore's original Bengali poems in my translated versions to read as competent English poems, reflecting the sine-graph of the contemporary English-language idiom.

I definitely did not want them to stutter and languish under the cast of a post-Victorian-Augustan shadow and its inherent dated inflections.