Cultural Transfer, Rabindranath Tagore's Travels and Travel Writing

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on a few of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, especially the ones associated with his travels, and examines the many ways he made use of his voyages to distant lands for reasons that had to do with his abiding faith in cultural transfers. The chapter discusses his approach to translation itself, highlights his take on cultural translation, and focuses on his meditations on the contact zone of cultures that he inhabited on some occasions and the projects that he furthered because of them on other ones. Tagore’s concept of cultural transfer was based on a vision that scanted nationalism, transcended borders, and aimed for the kind of ideals that he wished fervently to work out in Visva-Bharati, where he dreamed of a place where the east and the west, and the north and the south could come together. So, this chapter focuses on four particular instances of cultural transfer/cultural translation: the way Rabindranath engaged in cultural translation in his lifetime through the English Gitanjali, his translation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” his English poem, “The Child,” and its Bengali transcriptions “Shishu Tirtho,” and his book based on his 1927 trip to Indonesia that Visva-Bharati has made available for us in 2010 as Letters from Java: Rabindranath Tagore’s Tour of South-East Asia 1927.