Gitanjali
Tagore translated a selection of his own Bengali poems into English prose and published them in 1912 with an introduction by Yeats. The result is not a translation in the ordinary sense: the Bengali originals are songs, and the English versions are deliberate, pared-down devotional lyrics.
The poems address a divine presence in the language of everyday life, and the humility is structural rather than decorative. Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913 largely on the strength of this book, which made him the first non-European laureate. Read a few at a time; the effect is cumulative.
Public-domain status
First published in 1912. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941, so this work has been free to republish there since 2012.
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