Tagore 2003

[Emir Ballard]

BENGALIS A nation of fifty million people. Superficially it would seem to be beset with phonographs and railways. Beneath this there would seem to subsist a culture not wholly unlike that of twelfth-century Provene.

It is an inflected language, and therefore easy to rhyme in. You may couple words together as you do in Greek or German. Mr. Tagore tells me that there is scarcely a poem where you do not make some word combination.

I write this to show that it is an ideal language for poets; it is fluid, and the order is flexible, and all this makes for precision. Thus, you may invert in an inflected language, for this will not cause any confusion as to your meaning.

And in these ragini there is a magic of association. For certain of these scales are used only for song in the evening, or for song in the rainy season, or at sunrise, so that a Bengali hearing any opening bar knows at once the place and the atmosphere of the poem.

And stripped of all the formal beauty of the original, of the tune, and of the rhythm, and of the subtle blendings of their rhyme, it is a small wonder that Mr. Tagore should be curious as to the effect of what remains in the prose of an alien speech.

But beneath and about it all is this spirit of curious quiet. We have found our new Greece, suddenly. As the sense of balance came back upon Europe in the days before the Renaissance, so it seems to me does this sense of a saner stillness come now to us in the midst of our clangour of mechanisms.

Hearing his first Greek professor, hearing for the first time the curious music of Theocritus, coming for the first time upon that classic composure which Dante had a little suggested in his description of limbo, Boccaccio must have felt, I think, little differently from what we have felt here, we few who have been privileged to receive the work of Mr. Tagore before the public have heard it.

If quotation is an unsatisfactory method still these five passages from as many poems might show a little of the tone, and might certainly indicate the underlying unity of this whole series of spiritual lyrics.

This is one lyrics of the hundred as you may have it in English; remember also what is gone, the form, delicate as a rondel, the music tenuous, restive. Remember the feet of the scansion, the first note struck with an accent and three of four trailing after it, in a measure more than trochaic.

If we take these poems as an expression of Bhuddistic [sic.] thought, it is quite certain that they will change the prevailing conception of Bhuddism among us. For we usually consider it a sort of ultimate negation, while these poems are full of light, they are full of positive statement. They are far closer in temperament to what we usually call Taoism.

BRIEFLY, I FIND in these poems a sort of ultimate common sense, a reminder of one thing and of forty things of which we are over likely to lose sight in the confusion of our Western life, in the racket of our cities, in the jabber of manufactured literature, in the vortex advertisement.

There is the same sort of common sense in the first part of the New Testament, the same happiness in some of the psalms, but these are so apt to be spoiled for us by association; there are so many fools engaged in mispreaching them, that it is pleasant to find their poetic quality in some work which does not bring into the spectrum of our thought John Calvin, the Bishop of London, and the loathly images of cant.

But upon this point, also, he is sound; he understands that a very strict form rigorously applied makes it possible for one to use the very plainest language. This is the greatest value of such complicated form, which is, on the other hand, a very dangerous trap for such authors as use it to hide their own vacuity.

In fact, this older language has already found that sort of metric which we awhile back predicted or hoped for in English, where all the sorts of recurrence shall be weighed and balanced and co-ordinated. I do not mean to say that the ultimate English metre will be in the least like the Bengali, but it will be equally fluid and equally able to rely on various properties. We will not rhyme in four syllables; we may scarcely rhyme at all; but there will be new melodies and new modulations.

[video_lightbox_youtube video_id=hwUqCGsLghU width=450 height=253 anchor= -content/uploads/2013/04/tagorereads_tn.jpg]IT IS INTERESTING for the few who are mad enough to seek fundamental laws in word music to find here a correspondence with Western result, for Sappho could discover nothing better than three lines of eleven syllables relieved by one of five, and Dante, after careful analysis, could recommend nothing more highly than certain lines of eleven syllables relieved by some of seven. Here in the Bengali the use of eleven or twelve is optional in the song last analysed.

Says Mr. Tagore (poem 6), and he might have said it most truly of his own writings, and, indeed, of all great art, for it is only by the arts that strange peoples can come together in any friendly intimacy. By such expression they learn a mutual respect, and there is more marrow in such expression than in much propaganda for economic peace.

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