Of Myself

Atmaparichay

Tagore Rabindranath

In the great Bengali poet's autobiographical writings we discover what his translators describe as "a heart of love, a mind at its service that can cut like a knife, and in some sense the spirit of a child". The six prose pieces, centering on the poet's quest, were composed at landmark moments during the second half of his life and published posthumously. At each point he looks back on a long creative journey. Here in their first English translation, the essays offer an insight into the intellectual and spiritual world of a twentieth-century genius.

About the Author

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of his own prose versions of his poems, greatly admired by W. B. Yeats. He was a Renaissance man – poet and writer of fiction, composer and artist and playwright, educationalist and reformer. Among writers who translated his work were Gide, Neruda, Pasternak and Akhmatova. His world tours featured debates with figures as diverse as his friend and admirer Gandhi, Einstein, Ezra Pound and H. G. Wells. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are Tagore's compositions.

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