About The Book

Translation after being uncared for in the long history of criticism is today an autonomous literary genre powerfully established on a sound theoretical groundwork. Bengal before and after the Indian partition in 1947 has not produced any examination of Tagore’s Red Oleanders as a translation text. Since its publication in 1926, no one in India and abroad has examined Tagore’s Red Oleanders keeping in mind the critical tenets of translation. It is indeed regrettable that neither an Indian nor any westerner has assessed Tagore so far as a translator of his own play. Professor Basudeb Chakraborti for the first time in the annuls of Tagore criticism evaluates Tagore’s Red Oleanders as an excellent piece of creative art with its fidelity and artistry to the original Bengali play, Rakta Karabi. Had Tagore not written Rakta Karabi, had he written Red Oleanders only, Professor Chakraborti cogently argues, Red Oleanders would have been recognized as a representative Indian symbolic play in English. Readers of Tagore will certainly welcome this book as a significant addition to Tagore criticism.