Shyama: In English - Paperback

by Rabindranath Tagore (Author)

Shyama, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's classic 1939 dance musical, is known to many of the 230 million Bengali-speaking people around the world. This English translation was prepared for the 2009 feature film version of Shyama, starring Kaberi Chatterjee, TS Vasunni, K Jatindra (Jiten) Singh and Basanta Mukherjee. Perhaps best described as a cross between opera and ballet, Shyama was Tagore's last major work for the stage. It reflects his artistic and philosophical reaction to both the turbulence of pre-Independence India and Hitler's persecution of Jews in Germany. This English translation by Jayanta, Obhi & Kaberi Chatterjee closely matches the movements of the dancers and, hence, the grammatical construction of the original Bengali. No attempt has been made to make the English text rhyme in translation as this would have created inconsistencies between the English translation and the dancers' movements.

Author Biography

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.