FOOTNOTES:
[1] A jingling sentence in the Bengali Child's Primer.
[2] Exercises in two-syllables.
[3] Roofed colonnade or balcony. The writer's family house is an irregular three-storied mass of buildings, which had grown with the joint family it sheltered, built round several courtyards or quadrangles, with long colonnades along the outer faces, and narrower galleries running round each quadrangle, giving access to the single rows of rooms.
[4] The men's portion of the house is the outer; and the women's the inner.
[5] These Bustees or settlements consisting of tumbledown hovels, existing side by side with palatial buildings, are still one of the anomalies of Calcutta. Tr.
[6] Corresponding to "Wonderland."
[7] There are innumerable renderings of the Ramayana in the Indian languages.
[8] A kind of crisp unsweetened pancake taken like bread along with the other courses.
[9] Food while being eaten, and utensils or anything else touched by the hand engaged in conveying food to the mouth, are considered ceremonially unclean.
[10] The writer is the youngest of seven brothers. The sixth brother is here meant.
[11] Obsolete word meaning bee.
[12] The lane, a blind one, leads, at right angles to the front verandah, from the public main road to the grounds round the house.
[13] God of Death.
[14] Goddess of Learning.
[15] The Jupiter Pluvius of Hindu Mythology.
[16] The King of the Yakshas is the Pluto of Hindu Mythology.
[17] Corresponding to Lethe.
[18] Krishna's playground.
[19] Correspondence clerk.
[20] Spices wrapped in betel leaf.
[21] It is considered sinful for non-brahmins to cast glances on neophytes during the process of their sacred-thread investiture, before the ceremony is complete.
[22] Two novices in the hermitage of the sage Kanva, mentioned in the Sanskrit drama, Sakuntala.
[23] The text for self-realisation.
[24] Bards or reciters.
[25] The Cow and the Brahmin are watchwords of modern Hindu Orthodoxy.
[26] An instrument on which the keynote is strummed to accompany singing.
[27] A large proportion of words in the literary Bengali are derived unchanged from the Sanskrit.
[28] Servants call the master and mistress father, and mother, and the children brothers and sisters.
[29] Name of Vishnu in his aspect of slayer of the proud demon, Madhu.
[30] Nirada is a Sanscrit word meaning cloud, being a compound of nira = water and da = giver. In Bengali it is pronounced nirode.
[31] Betel-leaf and spices.
[32] Father of the well-known artists Gaganendra and Abanindra. Ed.
[33] In Bengali this word has come to mean an informal uninvited gathering.
[34] Systems of notation were not then in use. One of the most popular of the present-day systems was subsequently devised by the writer's brother here mentioned. Tr.
[35] The new bride of the house, wife of the writer's fourth brother, above-mentioned. Tr.
[36] It may be helpful to the foreign reader to explain that the expert singer of Indian music improvises more or less on the tune outline made over to him by the original composer, so that the latter need not necessarily do more than give a correct idea of such outline. Tr.
[37] This would mean "the genius of Bhubanmohini" if that be taken as the author's name.
[38] Gifts of cloth for use as wearing apparel are customary by way of ceremonial offerings of affection, respect or seasonable greeting.
[39] The old Vaishnava poets used to bring their name into the last stanza of the poem, this serving as their signature. Bhanu and Rabi both mean the Sun. Tr.
[40] The dried and stripped centre-vein of a cocoanut leaf gives a long tapering stick of the average thickness of a match stick, and a bundle of these goes to make the common Bengal household broom which in the hands of the housewife is popularly supposed to be useful in keeping the whole household in order from husband downwards. Its effect on a bare back is here alluded to.—Tr.
[41] There was a craze for phrenology at the time. Tr.
[42] Latterly Sir Tarak Palit, a life-long friend of the writer's second brother. Tr.
[43] Saraswati, the goddess of learning, is depicted in Bengal as clad in white and seated among a mass of lotus flowers. Tr.
[44] With Indian music it is not a mere question of correctly rendering a melody exactly as composed, but the theme of the original composition is the subject of an improvised interpretative elaboration by the expounding Artist. Tr.
[45] Valmiki Pratibha means the genius of Valmiki. The plot is based on the story of Valmiki, the robber chief, being moved to pity and breaking out into a metrical lament on witnessing the grief of one of a pair of cranes whose mate was killed by a hunter. In the metre which so came to him he afterwards composed his Ramayana. Tr.
[46] Some Indian classic melodic compositions are designed on a scheme of accentuation, for which purpose the music is set, not to words, but to unmeaning notation-sounds representing drum-beats or plectrum-impacts which in Indian music are of a considerable variety of tone, each having its own sound-symbol. The Telena is one such style of composition. Tr.
[47] Reciters of Puranic legendary lore. Tr.
[48] The Goddess of Wealth.
[49] As distinguished generally from different provincial styles, but chiefly from the Dravidian style prevalent in the South. Tr.
[50] Many of the Hindustani classic modes are supposed to be best in keeping with particular seasons of the year, or times of the day. Tr.
[51] The world, as the Indian boy knows it from fairy tale and folklore, has seven seas and thirteen rivers. Tr.
[52] This is addressed to Yashoda, mother of Krishna, by his playmates. Yashoda would dress up her darling every morning in his yellow garment with a peacock plume in his hair. But when it came to the point, she was nervous about allowing him, young as he was, to join the other cowherd boys at the pasturage. So it often required a great deal of persuasion before they would be allowed to take charge of him. This is part of the Vaishnava parable of the child aspect of Krishna's play with the world. Tr.
[53] A Busti is an area thickly packed with shabby tiled huts, with narrow pathways running through, and connecting it with the main street. These are inhabited by domestic servants, the poorer class of artisans and the like. Such settlements were formerly scattered throughout the town even in the best localities, but are now gradually disappearing from the latter. Tr.
[54] One of Bankim Babu's brothers.
[55] The month corresponding to July-August, the height of the rainy season.
[56] The month of Aswin corresponds to September-October, the long vacation time for Bengal.
[57] Referring to his marriage with the writer's niece, Pratibha. Tr.
The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Personality
Cloth, 12mo.
Herein are brought together some of the lectures which Sir Rabindranath Tagore delivered while in this country. Among those included are found: What is Art? The World of Personality, The Second Birth, My School and Meditation. Many of the thousands of people who heard Sir Rabindranath speak on these different subjects will doubtless be glad of the opportunity here presented for further study of his thoughts and philosophy.
Songs of Kabir
Cloth, 12mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75.
"Tagore has given his songs their melodic English translation and Miss Evelyn Underhill has prepared an excellent preface for the volume which outlines the life and philosophy of 'Kabir.'" Review of Reviews.
"No one in the least sympathetic to spiritual aspiration can read these outpourings without catching fire at their flame and getting a sense of supernal things. Tagore, a kindred spirit, has done a service in making this old mystic, whose soul experiences did not make him abstract, whose high song was that of the ascetic, but of a weaver who trod the common ways of man, known to English readers." Bellman, Minneapolis, Minn.
"Upon the reality of life he erects his faith, and buttresses it with whatever of devotional good he may find in any religion. No ascetic, Kabir pictures the mystic world of his belief with a beautiful richness of symbolism." Philadelphia Public Ledger.
"Not only students of Indian literature or of comparative religions will welcome this striking translation of a fifteenth-century Indian mystic. Every one who is capable of responding to an appeal to cast off the swathings of formalism and come out into spiritual freedom, every one who is sensitive to poetry that, while highly symbolical, is yet clear and simple and full of beauty, will read it with interest and with heart-quickening." New York Times.
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The Cycle of Spring: A Play
Cloth, 12mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75.
This, the latest and richest of the author's plays, was recently performed in the courtyard of his Calcutta home by the masters and boys of Shantiniketan. The success was immense: and naturally, for the spirit of the play is the spirit of universal youth, filled with laughter and lyric fervour, jest and pathos and resurgence: immortal youth whose every death is a rebirth, every winter an enfolded spring.
"All the joy, the buoyancy, the resilience, the indomitable and irrepressible hopefulness of Youth are compacted in the lines of the play. The keynote is sounded, with subtle symbolism, in the Prelude, in which the King ranks above all matters of State or of Humanity the circumstances that two gray hairs had made their appearance behind the ear that morning.... Dramatic power, philosophy and lyric charm are brilliantly blended in a work of art that has the freshness and the promise of its theme." New York Tribune.
"A more beautiful play than 'The Cycle of Spring' by Sir Rabindranath Tagore it would be hard to find in all literature. It embodies the spirit of youth, and one can almost hear in it the laughter of the eternally young.... Not only the glamor of the Orient but the breath of Undying Youth is in this work of Tagore, a genius so peculiar to India, so utterly inartificial, so completely of imagination all compact that his colossal power begotten of Fairyland and the World of Visions makes us poor Occidentals look very small indeed." Rochester Post Express.
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The Hungry Stones and Other Stories
Cloth, 12mo, $1.35. Leather, $1.75.
"These short stories furnish a double guaranty of the Hindu Nobel Prize winner's rightful place among the notable literary figures of our times." New York Globe.
"Imagination, charm of style, poetry, and depth of feeling without gloominess, characterize this volume of stories of the Eastern poet. This new volume of his work which introduces him to English readers as a short-story writer is as significant of his power as are the verses that have preceded it." Boston Transcript.
"A book of strange, beautiful, widely varying tales. Through them all, the thread on which the beautiful beads are strung is the poet's mystic philosophy." New York Times.
"The unutterable fascination of the Orient will be found in all these beautiful tales. Exquisite art unlike that of any other living writer. Rabindranath Tagore is one of the magicians of modern literature—a transcendently great genius who brings to mammon-worshipping Western minds the fantasy, the enchantment, and the wonder of the Orient." Rochester Post Express.
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Stray Birds
Frontispiece and Decorations by Willy Pogany
12mo, $1.50.
Written during his present visit to America, this book may be said to contain the essence of all Tagore's poetry and philosophy, revealed by many aphorisms, epigrams and sayings.
Here is the kernel of the wisdom and insight of the great Hindu seer in the form of short extracts. These sayings are the essence of his Eastern message to the Western world. The frontispiece and decorations by Willy Pogany are beautiful in themselves, and enhance the spiritual significance of this extraordinary book.
"Each reflects some aspect of beauty, in thought or in nature, or some of the many-sided philosophical reflections of the author. In one sense these stray birds are tiny prose poems, a fact which makes the dedication of the volume to 'T. Hara, of Yokohama,' peculiarly appropriate, for they all suggest the delicacy and minuteness of Japanese poetry as it is known to us in translation." Philadelphia Public Ledger.
"Pleasing and inspiring." Boston Daily Advertiser.
"His utterances have something of the elusive delicacy of memories of moral experiences out of a remote past." Nation.
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Nobel Prizeman in Literature, 1913. Author of "Gitanjali," "The Gardener," "The Crescent Moon," "Sadhana."
Chitra
A PLAY IN ONE ACT
Cloth, 12mo, $1.00. Leather, $1.75.
"The play is told with the simplicity and wonder of imagery always characteristic of Rabindranath Tagore." Cleveland Plain Dealer.
"All the poetry of Tagore is here." ... Poetry Journal.
"Beautiful and marked by skilful rhythm." Newark Evening News.
"A clear portrayal of the dual nature of womankind." Graphic.
"The play is finely idyllic." Chicago Daily Tribune.
"A pretty situation, prettily worked out. And there is something piquant in the combination of the old Hindu metaphorical style, half mystical in allusion, with what is really a plea for the emancipation of women." The Nation.
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Fruit Gathering
Cloth, 12mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75.
"A shining pathway up which we can confidently travel to those regions of wisdom and experience which consciously or unconsciously we strive to reach." Boston Transcript.
"Quaintly lovely fragments." Chicago Herald.
"Exquisitely conceived and with all the distinctive grace which marked 'Song Offerings.'" San Francisco Chronicle.
"Exotic fragrance." Chicago Daily News.
"The songs have the quality of universality—the greatest quality which poetry can possess." Chicago Tribune.
"As perfect in form as they are beautiful and poignant in content." The Athenæum, London.
"Nothing richer nor sweeter.... Something of Omar Khayyam and something of Rabbi ben Ezra, expressed more at length and more mystically. In smoothly flowing rhythms, with vivid little pictures of life's activities, the poet sings of old age, the fruit gathering time, its sadness and its glory, its advantages and its sorrows." The Boston Globe.
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The Post Office
Cloth, 12mo, $1.00; leather, $1.75.
"... filled with tender pathos and spiritual beauty. There are two acts, and the story is that of a frail little Indian lad condemned to seclusion and inaction by ill health. He makes a new world for himself, however, by his imagination and insatiable curiosity, and the passersby bring the world of action to him. The play has been presented in England by the Irish Players, and fully adapts itself to the charming simplicity and charm which are their principal characteristics." Phila. Public Ledger.
"A beautiful and appealing piece of dramatic work." Boston Transcript.
"Once more Tagore demonstrates the universality of his genius; once more he shows how art and true feeling know no racial and no religious lines." Kentucky Post.
"One reads in 'The Post Office' his own will of symbolism. Simplicity and a pervading, appealing pathos are the qualities transmitted to its lines by the poet." N. Y. World.
"He writes from his soul; there is neither bombast nor didacticism. His poems bring one to the quiet places where the soul speaks to the soul surely but serenely." N. Y. American.
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The King of the Dark Chamber
By
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Nobel Prizeman in Literature, 1913; Author of "Gitangali," "The Gardener," "The Crescent Moon," "Sadhana," "Chitra," "The Post-Office," etc. Cloth 12 mo, $1.25; leather, $1.75.
"The real poetical imagination of it is unchangeable; the allegory, subtle and profound and yet simple, is cast into the form of a dramatic narrative, which moves with unconventional freedom to a finely impressive climax; and the reader, who began in idle curiosity, finds his intelligence more and more engaged until, when he turns the last page, he has the feeling of one who has been moving in worlds not realized, and communing with great if mysterious presences."
The London Globe.
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OTHER WORKS BY
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Nobel Prizeman in Literature, 1913
| GITANJALI (Song Offerings). A Collection of Prose Translations made by the author from the original Bengali. New Edition | $1.25 |
| THE GARDENER. Poems of Youth | $1.25 |
| THE CRESCENT MOON. Child Poems. (Colored Ill.) | $1.25 |
| SADHANA: THE REALIZATION OF LIFE. A volume of essays | $1.25 |
All four by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by the author from the original Bengali.
Rabindranath Tagore is the Hindu poet and preacher to whom the Nobel Prize was recently awarded....
I would commend these volumes, and especially the one entitled "Sadhana," the collection of essays, to all intelligent readers. I know of nothing, except it be Maeterlinck, in the whole modern range of the literature of the inner life that can compare with them.
There are no preachers nor writers upon spiritual topics, whether in Europe or America, that have the depth of insight, the quickness of religious apperception, combined with the intellectual honesty and scientific clearness of Tagore....
Here is a book from a master, free as the air, with a mind universal as the sunshine. He writes, of course, from the standpoint of the Hindu. But, strange to say, his spirit and teaching come nearer to Jesus, as we find Him in the Gospels, than any modern Christian writer I know.
He does for the average reader what Bergson and Eucken are doing for scholars; he rescues the soul and its faculties from their enslavement to logic-chopping. He shows us the way back to Nature and her spiritual voices.
He rebukes our materialistic, wealth-mad, Western life with the dignity and authority of one of the old Hebrew prophets....
He opens up the meaning of life. He makes us feel the redeeming fact that life is tremendous, a worth-while adventure. "Everything has sprung from immortal life and is vibrating with life. LIFE IS IMMENSE." ...
Tagore is a great human being. His heart is warm with love. His thoughts are pure and high as the galaxy.
(Copyright, 1913, by Frank Crane.) Reprinted by permission from the New York Globe, Dec. 18, 1913.
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