Lyrics to Love is an impressive compilation of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry, masterfully translated into English by Amitabha Basu. What sets this 101-poem collection apart from other translated works is his ardent focus on highlighting the lyrical rhythms and patterns Tagore created in his original that evokes such feeling.
The nuances of Tagore's expressions - of love, hope, passion, senses and sensibilities - are all elegantly and meticulously captured in the translations in this book. Basu's work aims to bring forth awareness of one of the world's most revered poets. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Literature, though many have never read his translations from the original Bengali. The readers will enjoy this collection - an excellent and highly aesthetic work. It is a welcome arrival for the literary enthusiasts of the English-speaking world, always interested in reading Tagore's work but unable due to a lack of good translation.
These translations reflect not only mastery of both the languages, English and Bengali, but also intimate familiarity of the translator with the inherent culture embedded in the original writings of Tagore. This familiarity enables him to uniquely and faithfully capture nuances so difficult to convey in ordinary translations.
Amitabha Basu is a professor of Bengali at the University of California, Berkeley and formerly at Stanford University.
