Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta,India into a wealthy Brahmin family.After a brief stay in England (1878) to attempt to study law,he returned to India,and instead pursued a career as a writer,playwright,songwriter,poet,philosopher and educator.During the first 51 years of his life he achieved some success in the Calcutta area of India where he was born and raised with his many stories,songs and plays.His short stories were published monthly in a friend's magazine and he even played the lead role in a few of the public performances of his plays.Otherwise,he was little known outside of the Calcutta area,and not known at all outside of India.
This all suddenly changed in 1912.He then returned to England for the first time since his failed attempt at law school as a teenager.Now a man of 51,his was accompanied by his son.On the way over to England he began translating,for the first time,his latest selections of poems,Gitanjali,into English.Almost all of his work prior to that time had been written in his native tongue of Bengali.He decided to do this just to have something to do,with no expectation at all that his first time translation efforts would be any good.He made the handwritten translations in a little notebook he carried around with him and worked on during the long sea voyage from India.Upon arrival,his son left his father's brief case with this notebook in the London subway.Fortunately,an honest person turned in the briefcase and it was recovered the next day.Tagore's one friend in England,a famous artist he had met in India,Rothenstein,learned of the translation,and asked to see it.Reluctantly,with much persuasion,Tagore let him have the notebook.The painter could not believe his eyes.The poems were incredible.He called his friend,W.B.Yeats,and finally talked Yeats into looking at the hand scrawled notebook.
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