The Essential Tagore
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 The cover image of the Essential Tagore (Harvard edition). | |
| Author | Rabindranath Tagore |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Publication date | 2011 |
| Publication place | United States and India |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 819 |
| ISBN | 978-0-674-05790-6 |
| OCLC | 676725370 |
The Essential Tagore is the largest collection of Rabindranath Tagore's works available in English. It was published by Harvard University Press in the United States and Visva-Bharati University in India to mark the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth.[1] Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakrabarthy edited the anthology. Among the notable contributors who translated Tagore's works for this anthology are Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunetra Gupta, Syed Manzoorul Islam, and Kaiser Haq.[1][2] Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher, writer and critic proposed the book as the 'Book of the Year' in the New Statesman published on 21 November 2011.[3]
The anthology is around eight hundred pages long, divided into ten sections, each devoted to a different facet of Tagore's achievement.[4] In this anthology, the editors endeavored to represent his extraordinary achievements in ten genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays. Most of the translations were done in modern contemporary English. Besides the new translations, it includes a sampling of works originally composed in English, Tagore's translations of his own works.