The interior of our home. It was full of music, poetry and philosophy.
Dear friends,
I’d like to tell you about my work on the poems of Rabindranath Tagore. I have translated ten of his collections into Finnish.
It all started when I was a child. There were two collections of poems of Tagore in Finnish at the time, The Gardener and Gitanjali. They were both in our bookshelf, so I read them when I was very little.
I grew up in the country in southern Finland. My home was not a typical Finnish home, it was more like a temple. My parents were artists and very devoted theosophists, so I learned about India and its religions quite early. My father was a composer and writer, my mother recited poems and they gave concerts together. I grew up among poems and music. Our home was also a farmhouse and I used to work in the fields and with the cattle.
Later I studied biology and geography at the University of Helsinki (Master of Science 1975), majoring in geography of countries outside of Europe. I also made radio shows on nature and environmental problems. Then I worked for ten years in a big publishing company as an editor and geographer of a large Encyclopaedia. After that I had two children and worked as a freelancer, editing books and writing articles about environmental and global problems,
literature and psychology.
The first translations
I had a good friend in Germany who sent me poems of Tagore in German. So I found out that there were many more poems than I had seen before. I ordered collections of his poems (via the Library of the University of Helsinki) from England, Denmark and Germany, and started translating them just for myself. The things in my past made me feel very connected to them. Even the work in the fields was a great help to understand Tagore, the poet ‘close to the land’.
My first Tagore-translation was Rakkauden laulu (‘Song of love’, a small selection of love songs), published in 2002. It was decorated with pictures painted by my mother.
There is no Finnish biography of Tagore, so I have written long forewords to my collections, as well as glossaries and notes to the poems. Several of the cover pictures are painted by Alex Popov, a talented artist, who happens to be my son-in-law.
Even though Tagore and India have always been highly respected in Finland, it has not been easy to find publishers for his poems. Finland has a small population. The prints of the poetry books are very small, so for the publishers the poems are economically challenging. They are more like cultural achievements – ‘feather in the cap -books’. So I have changed from one publisher to another. This has meant many efforts and lots of waiting for me.
Sadly, I do not speak or read Bangla. I have translated everything from The English Writings of Tagore edited by Sisir Kumar Das and published by Sahitya Akademi. I have also re-translated some poems of the English translations of Ketaki Kushari Dyson and William Radice and the German translations of Martin Kämpchen.
Many doors were opened
In order to understand poetry from a remote culture, written in another language, you have to know a lot about the culture and the thinking, emotions and personality of the writer. I read about Tagore for more than ten years before I published any translations, and have kept on reading.
My most important sources have been the writings of Buddhadeva Bose, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Krishna Kripalani, Martin Kämpchen, William Radice and Amartya Sen. And of course all writings of Rabindranath himself – and his son Rathindranath.
There are also many writings in the internet. Once I found the home pages of Ketaki Kushari Dyson and simply wrote her an email. She responded and was delighted! So the correspondence started and pretty soon changed into friendship. I’m proud to call her my friend!
front row in her red skirt and I’m standing next to her.
Ketaki and I met in a conference in Budapest in 2012. There I also met William Radice, Alka Pande, Vijay Kowshik, Prayag Shukla, Imre Bangha and other Tagore scholars. This conference was one of the highlights of my career.
Ketaki Dyson told me about the Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose that she had translated. So I ordered the book – and certainly was not planning to translate it. Then something happened. I started to cry reading those poems – and then I had to translate them. So, the collection *KALKUTTA ja muita runoja *(CALCUTTA and other poems) was the first collection of Buddhadeva Bose in Finland and also the first collection of modern Indian poetry in this country.
I have also translated a small collection of poems of Nirupam Chakraborti. He is a professor of technology – and a poet. He has also published several books on technology. He just informed me that AGH University of Krakow, a leading technical university in Poland, awarded him with their highly prestigious Faculty Medal of Honor. The university focuses on innovative technologies, and professor Chakraborti certainly has been ahead of his time, too. He has specialised in soft computing, which is very interesting – and maybe not so far from poetry. He once made an interview of me and it was published in Bangla in 4 Number Platform (September 25, 2023).
Finding incredible treasures
Translating poems is important! Buddhadeva Bose has written a lot about it - about the life of dreams and the unconscious, without which no one would be fully human, and how you can bring jewels from that life into the consciousness only by using your mother tongue – and that a poet acts there as a go-between, giving form to our chaotic dream self and bringing our consciousness into contact with the dreams.
Translating poems is like digging treasures up from the ground. When I read them in my mother tongue, they go into deeper layers in my mind. In Tagore as a person I adore his courage to re-think everything. It has been a tremendous support for me in my life. Even if he was sometimes afraid or depressed and so many sad things happened to him, he did not lose his courage. He was a great activist and reformer in arts and society.
The top of my career was the big event arranged by the Indian Ambassadors Aladiyan Manickam and Ashok Kumar Sharma in Helsinki in 2014. There was as large reception in Kalastajatorppa, where President Pranab Mukherjee launched my translation Sininen sari (The Blue Sari), a selection of love poems of Tagore. The book was first presented by the Finnish foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja. Then I said a few words. I gave a copy of the book to the President saying that I give it to him ‘with bhalobasa’ – and how he smiled! There was a huge applause from the audience!
And the President spoke so beautifully, from his heart! Afterwards my husband and I were invited to a dinner given by the President of Finland in honour of President Mukherjee.
Crossing borders
The poems remind me of the migratory birds – the poems, too, fly across the borders when they are translated. Tagore was a great cosmopolitan and in his university, Visva-Bharati, he tried to see the whole world as one nest. I am proud to tell you that one of my articles on Tagore was published in *Visva-Bharati Quarterly *some years ago. I also participated in a big effort, a book called Rabindranath Tagore – One Hundred Years of Global Reception. I wrote the article about Tagore in Finland.
In my opinion Tagore is more relevant now than ever – for the whole world! His ideas of harmony between man and nature and about the global problems and unity of mankind are still ahead of time, even today! I have suggested that since we already have an Earth Day and Earth Hour we also ought to have an Earth Poet and it should be Tagore.
I am still in touch with Ketaki Dyson. At the moment she is very frail and cannot read or write any letters. So I keep sending her music and shawls and blankets to be wrapped around her. I am so grateful to her.
I know that the real Tagore is in his Bangla poems much more than in his English versions. I would like to bring more of the original Tagore to the Finnish readers. Maybe it will happen one day!
Poems are like flowers
Translating poems is a subspecies of being a poet. One has to interpret the idea of the poet and the result has to be a good poem in the target language, too. One does not translate words but thoughts, feelings and images. Tagore did not like the poems to be explained. If somebody did not understand a poem, he
said that he could not help him: if somebody does not understand a fragrance of a flower, how can one explain it to him? It is a fragrance…
I understand very well what he meant and I agree – but how do you translate a fragrance? That is the question!
Since I am a biologist, the plants of Bengal are in good order in my translations! A noted botanist, Arto Kurtto, is in charge of Vanamo – the Biological Society in Finland, and they have invented tens of new names for Indian trees and flowers especially for the poems of Tagore! I think it is a good thing, since nature and plants were so important for him.
What is it in the poems of Tagore that fascinates me so much? – Those many layers. Those sudden deep currents. His love for nature. Buddhadeva Bose wrote about Tagore: ’He is the poet of the fleeting moment, of the dream
still remembered at dawn, of memories of past existences, and of perceptions we can scarcely define.’
— That’s it in a nutshell.