Joyjit Ghosh
Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore- 721102, West Bengal. Email: joyjitghosh@mail.vidyasagar.ac.in
Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.21
First published September 30, 2019
Abstract
Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for his English translation of Gitanjali in 1913. He was at once accepted by the Western people as one of their own poets. In the ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’, Tagore, however, categorically stated that he must not accept the laurels as his ‘individual share’ because he represented the East and it was the East in him that gave to the West. Tagore always believed in a cooperation of cultures across the world. He was certain that he belonged to an age which bore witness to the meeting of the East and the West. The present paper while making an analytical study of ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’ will try to establish that the objective of Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali into English was not merely to ‘rekindle’ the aesthetic delight which the poet once experienced during the composition of the work in Bengali but to create a space for a dialogue between two separate spheres of civilization – the East and the West.
Keywords: Culture, Dialogue, Meeting, Mission, Translation
