The Lover of God (Lannan Literary Selections)
When these 22 poems began appearing in Calcutta in 1875, they seemed the work of a seventeenth-century Bengali scholar-poet. But they were a hoax at the expense of European-inspired literary archaeologists mining Indian literature for forgotten treasure. Their real author was the 14-year-old son of a prominent Bengali businessman. Moreover, though he was coy about their worth throughout his long career, the 1913 Nobel laureate last revised them mere weeks before his death in 1941. Twichell's free versions, based on Stewart's literal parsings and printed face-to-face with the Bengali text, evoke the spiritual content that kept Tagore's interest: the longing for god that only death fulfills. Directly about the beloved of adolescent Krishna during his sojourn as a human, the poems contain two voices, that of the longing girl, Radha, and that of a counselor, seemingly an older woman, who consoles her and chides the god for his absence. An introduction, a postscript, and a translation of Tagore's facetious biography of the ostensible poet invaluably complete a lovely volume.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved