'Gitanjali' Summary

The English Gitanjali or Song Offerings is a collection of 103 English prose poems, which are Tagore's own English translations of his Bengali poems first published in November 1912 by the India Society, in London. It contained translations of 53 poems from the original Bengali Gitanjali, as well as 50 other poems from his other works. The translations were often radical, leaving out or altering large chunks of the poem and in one instance fusing two separate poems (song 95, which unifies songs 89,90 of Naivedya).  The English Gitanjali became popular in the West, and was widely translated.