Poetry

The 1911-13-15 trilogy of the Gitanjali (Offering of Songs), Gitimalya (Garland of Songs) and Gitali (Song Lyrics) are about God and the human soul, God and nature, nature and the soul, the soul and humanity; they often run over into one another. Swinging from intuitive experience, suffused with vision, they appeal irresistibly to the depths of the spirit. Over the sensitive soul, like the wind oar the lyre, they strike at the roots of life, at the vital experiences that sustain it and give grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. (The Poetry of Tagore by S.K.

During hectic years as a teacher and translator the writing of these poems provided a welcome retreat into the imagination for William Radice; hence the book’s title, which is also the title of its central section. The word also has poignant personal associations for the poet, ‘The Retreat’ being the name of the Cambridge house of his friend Juan mascara, the brilliant translator of the Penguin classics editions of the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Dhammapada. Radice has edited mascara;s aphorisms and uses one of them as the epigraph to this collection.

“Muharram and the villagers have come, Drunk with excitement, singing jan songs...” Thus a twentieth century poet describes the intensely emotional Muslim festival of Muharram from which many of the songs known as jarigan in Bangladesh have originated. These narrative songs, too epic in their dimension to be called ballads, blend influences from sacred and secular Perso-Arabic literature of the Middle East with compositional roots in the epic poetry of South Asia.