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William Radice, ed. & trans., Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems of Rabindranath Tagore.
New Delhi: HarperCollins, Pages 202 (pb), Price Rs 195,
ISBN 81-7223-411-2.

   Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated, introduced, and edited by William Radice is a must for Tagore aficionados. Radice’s Penguin Selected Poems and Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore have already earned him many admirers and accolades. This new book confirms his reputation as one of the finest translators of India’s only Nobel laureate in literature. Radice is also a fine poet himself, and his erudition and craft that is evident in his own four poetry collections — Eight Sections, Louring Skies, Strivings and The Retreat — is as much at play as his penchant for the Bengali language. This is something we experience beautifully as we peer into and enjoy some of Tagore’s more elusive works — Kanika (‘Particles’, 1899), Lekhan (‘Jottings’, 1927) and Sphulinga (‘Sparks’, 1945); plus
“two short texts that have not — even in Bengali — been published before.”
Here are two pithy couplets from ‘Particles’:

     The blind owl boasts whenever he can:
     ‘Do you know who my enemy is? The sun!’
                                                                          (“Glory in Enmity”)

     Weeping at night won’t bring back the sun,
     And it makes the light of the stars seem vain.  
                                                                          (“Pointless Grief ”)