My Reminiscences
Public-domain ebook
My Reminiscences
Language: en5,729 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: India·Biographies·Nobel Prizes in Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #22217.
About this book
My Reminiscences is a reflective memoir by Rabindranath Tagore, the celebrated Bengali poet and thinker of the early twentieth‑century. The work opens with a candid translator’s note that explains the difficulty of rendering Tagore’s “lightness of manner and importance of matter” into English, and why the translator, who knew the people and places described, felt compelled to undertake a “free translation” with added footnotes. From there the text moves into Tagore’s own preface, where he likens memory to a painter’s canvas, insisting that his recollections are “pictures” rather than a strict chronicle of events. The opening chapters already reveal a blend of personal anecdote, cultural observation, and philosophical musing, setting the tone for a series of vignettes that range from childhood schooling to travels and artistic encounters.
The voice is unmistakably Tagore’s: lyrical, introspective, and steeped in the sensibilities of a late‑Victorian Indian intellectual. His prose weaves poetry into prose, often pausing to contemplate the nature of recollection and the role of art in shaping experience. Readers who appreciate literary memoirs that combine autobiographical detail with broader cultural reflection, particularly those interested in Bengali history, colonial‑era education, and the formative influences on a Nobel laureate, will find this work both illuminating and richly textured.
Who appears in My Reminiscences
- Rabindranath TagoreMiddle‑aged Bengali gentleman, dark hair and moustache, wearing white shirt and dhoti, thoughtful expression
The opening · free to read
This lightness of manner and importance of matter form a combination the translation of which into a different language is naturally a matter of considerable difficulty. It was, in any case, a task which the present Translator, not being an original writer in the English language, would hardly have ventured to undertake, had there not been other considerations. The translator's familiarity, however, with the persons, scenes, and events herein depicted made it a temptation difficult for him to resist, as well as a responsibility which he did not care to leave to others not possessing these advantages, and therefore more liable to miss a point, or give a wrong impression.
The Translator, moreover, had the author's permission and advice to make a free translation, a portion of which was completed and approved by the latter before he left India on his recent tour to Japan and America.
In regard to the nature of the freedom taken for the purposes of the translation, it may be mentioned that those suggestions which might not have been as clear to the foreign as to the Bengali reader have been brought out in a slightly more elaborate manner than in the original text; while again, in rare cases, others which depend on allusions entirely unfamiliar to the non-Indian reader, have been omitted rather than spoil by an over-elaboration the simplicity and naturalness which is the great feature of the original.
There are no footnotes in the original. All the footnotes here given have been added by the Translator in the hope that they may be of further assistance to the foreign reader.
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