Monday, August 22, 2016

Selected Poems, Rabindranath Tagore

Books of poetry are the most difficult rate. Not only are poems more abstract than stories and novels, but they are shorter, so you can fit more of them into a single volume, causing a conflict of interest when comparing higher-quality poems to lesser ones. There's also the problem of translation: poems translated into English are often written better in their original language, which should be no surprise to anyone. 

These poems of Tagore were originally written in Bengali. I have no doubt the book would get five stars if I'd read it without the corruption of a translation. That's no fault of Tagore's or the translator, just an unfair necessity when rating a book of foreign poetry. Two of the best poems in this volume were Unending Love and Earth, probably because there were no identifiable rhyme schemes. Both poems are sufficient enough to make one realize that Tagore was an incredible poet, even if some of what he tried to say was lost in translation. 

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