Tagore’s Poetry in English Translation : a critical review

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), generally regarded as the most important poet in Bengali, is also the most translated Bengali poet. It is well-known that Tagore himself is one of the significant translators of his poems, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913 for his first volume of translated poetry Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912). Apart from Tagore there are many other translators whose translations have been published in book forms. My searches show that more than sixty volumes of translated poetry by individual translators have appeared in print by the end of 2011. The objective of the present article is to discuss the phenomena related to these translations such as the publishing agents, places of publications, the trends of translations over time and most importantly the distinctive features or the quality of these translations as far as possible