Tagore’s Gitanjali translated in Belarusian language
Famous Belarusian publisher Dmitry Kolas has brought out last week a translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of poems, Gitanjali, for which in 1913 Tagore became the first Asian and non-white to win Nobel Prize for Literature. The book titled ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings’ was published in Minsk. It has a total of 128 pages and 250 copies have been made for circulation. The poems were translated by Republic of Belarus State Prize winner Alexander Ryazanov.
Gitanjali is one of the nearly four dozen books published in the series Poets of the Planet. The translations were done from the English version of the London edition of Gitanjali. Having been the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Tagore transcended his status as a poet, composer, dramatist and artist to become a true philosopher who inspired his own school of thought.
The series Poets of the Planet already includes Belarusian translations of poems by Sappho, Francesco Petrarca, Pierrede Ronsard, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gabriela Mistral, Omar Khayyam, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Houmllderlin, Heinrich Gainy, Guillaume Apollinaire and many of the poets of Europe, Asia and America.
Among the interpreters - Max Schur, Lavon Borshevsky Yuri Golub, Gregory Borodulin Andrey Hodonovich, Eugene Belasin, Yuri Gavruk, Vasil Siomuha and other artists of the words have been working on the ‘reincarnation’ of different artistic cultures, different national landscapes into the Belarusian language. Gitanjali turns out to be an addition to that rich list. Incidentally the first translation of Gitanjali was in English and famous poet W.B. Yeats had written a forward to that book that went to the Nobel committee for consideration.
