ON A PLINTH in St Stephen’s Green, in the company of figures including James Joyce, Constance Markievicz, Arthur Guinness and Theobald Wolfe Tone is a bronze bust of Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore.
If you passed it, you might ask yourself: who is Rabindranath Tagore? And what is his connection to Ireland?
Well, Tagore is the first Asian recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest son of religious leader and reformer Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath began writing poems at the age of eight. By the time he turned sixteen, he published his first collection of poems under the pseudonym Bhānusimha (Sun Lion).
Returning to his birth name, Tagore published over fifty volumes of poetry, wrote musical drams, essays, travel diaries, songs and two autobiographies. His most famous work includes 1910′s Gitanjali (Song Offerings) and Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat) from 1984. Also an accomplished visual artist, he left behind a body of paintings and drawings after his death in 1941 at the age of eighty.
He was commemorated in the Dublin park as a reciprocal gesture for a street in Chanakyapuir, Dehli that was named after Eamon De Valera, in 2007. The statue was unveiled in 2011 by former Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore and India’s Minister for External Affairs, Preneet Kaur.
And that Irish connection? Notable admirers of Tagore’s work included William Butler Yeats, whom the poet met during one of his many trips to England in 1912.
Yeats was responsible for getting Tagore’s work translated to English, garnering a wider audience across the Western World. The Post Office, a play by Tagore was translated by Yeats and performed in The Abbey Theatre in October 1913.
Yeats said of one of Tagore’s works: “I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics… display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live [sic] long.” (He is quoted in this article on History Ireland.)
A recurring theme throughout Tagore’s poems is an exploration of man’s connection with nature. The choice, then, of Stephen’s Green for the bust is fitting as the park is a popular destination for readers every summer.
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