Shyama: In English (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781440402043)

In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The award was mainly for his own English translations of his Bengali poetry in a collection called Gitanjali, which had been published in 1912. Although Tagore died in 1941, his vast body of writings has become a major pillar of Bengali literature. Although he is known outside India almost exclusively as a poet and philosopher, he also wrote over 2,200 songs, as well as many short stories, novels and plays. Several of these have been made into films. Tagore was also a painter and created the dance form seen in Shyama. At the same time, he was a pioneer in rural development and a social reformer who was as well known in India as his contemporary Gandhi, whom he named the 'Mahatma'. Shyama has not been translated previously into English or, indeed, into the other languages into which other works by Tagore have been translated, such as French, Spanish, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Japanese. This is perhaps because Tagore completed Shyama just after the start of the Second World War and 2 years before his death in 1941. It may also have been because Shyama was conceived by Tagore as an audiovisual work, with the action performed by dancers. The full effect was difficult to convey through the written word, even in Bengali. It was even harder in translation. This book contains the first English translation of Shyama and accompanies the feature film version, also available from this e-store.