Memoir: Tagore's Memoir

Author: (India) Rabindranath Tagore
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: He is regarded as a poet who shows compassion for the weak and empathy for the oppressed masses. He is seen as a distinguished representative who despises darkness and strives for light. He is regarded as "the life of life" and "the fountain of life." He is seen as having a heart of "serene beauty and melancholy." He sang for "the humble life and the insignificant suffering," mourned over poverty, backwardness, and national humiliation, and at the age of fifty-two, won the Nobel Prize in Literature with his "most sensitive, fresh, and beautiful" poem, Gitanjali—Hunger Stones. He was an honored Easterner who received this prestigious award. He is called the "saint of poetry," the "conscience of India," and the "soul of India." He represents justice and humanity. He is an unextinguished lamp of light in this chaotic world filled with slaughter and hatred.
Biographies and memoirs about him are numerous, but only this book, along with his later-written My Childhood, was written by him personally. All other writings cannot bypass this book. It was translated into English and published by Macmillan in 1917. This is a masterpiece filled with poetry, exquisite writing, lofty, and is hard to come by. Reasons to read this book: He became the first Eastern writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature with his "most sensitive, fresh, and beautiful" poems. The renowned Swedish poet Hjalmar Gullberg highly praised him as a "poet of truly great ideals." The famous Irish poet W. B. Yeats believed his poetry was a "product of high civilization," seeing in it the world he had long dreamed of. The American modernist poet Ezra Pound even said, "We discovered our new Greece," and before him, "I felt like a wild man with a stone club and animal skin." He was the most influential figure in introducing Indian culture to the West while also introducing Western culture to India.
This autobiography, titled Reminiscences, was written in 1916 when he was fifty-five. This book records only his life and ideals from birth to the age of twenty-four. At twenty-five, he had already become a highly accomplished and outstanding lyrical poet among his peers. His father was a religious philosopher, a religious reformer, and a major figure in the Brahmo Samaj. When his grandfather passed away at the age of twenty, he lamented, "Life is so desolate, the world is like a graveyard." He grew up in a family filled with wisdom, talent, passion, and a spirit of freedom. His mother bore fifteen children and managed a large family of over a hundred people across four generations. He was the fifteenth child and had six older brothers. He married at the age of twenty-two, arranged by his parents. In this book, he records many people and events related to him but makes no mention of his marriage or his "wise Tagore wife."
Suitable for: Scholars or enthusiasts of Sino-foreign cultural exchange history, scholars or enthusiasts of Indian culture, scholars or enthusiasts of the Nobel Prize in Literature, scholars or enthusiasts of poetry, and students at all levels.