69 Verses

The book '69 Verses' is a collection of songs and poems, a tiny slice, fished
out from the vast sea of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's creation.
These songs and poems are translated in English rhyming poetry form the
original Bengali compositions. Of these 69 verses, most of them are from
Gitanjali - the book that overwhelmed Yeats when he first read it, and which
won Tagore the Nobel Prize in 1913 and earned a place for the modern
Indian literature in the map of world literature. The entire gamut of human
emotions: hopes, aspirations, fear and frustration, the joy, the pangs all find
authentic expressions in the vast oeuvre of Tagore's works. The present
collection is mainly intended to provide a sample of his lyrical songs tinged
with mysticism. The roots of these poems hark back right to the very earliest
poetic achievements of humankind ---- the ancient Vedas. They also echo
the strains of the medieval mystic saints of India and the Sufis, of the
wandering minstrels that have not yet been completely destroyed from the
rural India by the invasive modernity. These poems thus carry the
resonances of the spiritual heart of India's long history. Music is an essential
quality of Tagore's mystic poems. The translator has attempted with
admirable success to communicate the spirit and rhythm of the Bengali
originals. This has not been attempted so far by more than one or two
translators because most of the time the flavor of the original work gets
subdued, subtlety of rhythm gets reduced and the delicacy of color gets lost
in translation. However, here the translator has tried to retain these
properties of Tagore's creations to a considerable extent.