Remembering Rabindranath Tagore Volume - High Commission of ...

Gitanjali – Lotus and the Empty Basket
Edmund Jayasuriya
whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have taken
A up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but
because we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti’s Willow wood,
or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.
- W.B .Yeats in his introduction to Gitanjali.
Way back in the late 50s when I read Gitanjali for the first time I was only 24 years of
age. During a stroll along the Kalu Ganga one evening, I walked into the Railway Station
where there was a small McCallum Book depot. It is there that I found this ‘treasure’; a
small book, smelling fresh from the press and with a blue and cream cover.
When I decided to buy this book I knew precious little of Tagore; but two short stories
and a poem of his I have read were vivid in my memory. One was The Postmaster where
Tagore tries to explore the sensitive relationship between the post master and Rattan the
village girl, and the other was The Cabuliwallah where a prisoner carries in his pocket
a wrinkled piece of paper with the ink-smeared imprint of a tiny hand, his daughter’s.
The title of the poem I do not remember now but it dealt with the dreams of a child
who, seeing a man who lights street lamps, wishes to be one himself when he grows up!
Perhaps it was these memories that compelled me to buy this volume.
Little did I realise what was in store for me!
After dinner that night -my temporary abode at the time was a room of the Teachers’
Hostel of Kalutara Maha Vidyalaya- I began to read Gitanjali and I did not, or could not
take my eyes off until I finished reading its last line. It was past midnight. A waning moon
shone in the deep blue sky and a few scattered stars were out while a cool breeze stole
into my room through the window complementing my mood which was poetic ecstasy.
It was indeed a revelation; here was a book that has enthralled me as none other had done
in my life. I was stunned and shocked and that experience was hauntingly beautiful. i then
realised the real meaning and significance of Yeats’ observation that he had to close the book
when he was reading it in buses and trains lest others should notice his emotional reactions.
I think I was in that mood for a couple of weeks, recollecting the feeling behind each
verse, more than its meaning. It was this reliving of the experience that finally led me to
translate Gitanjali into Sinhala.
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