'The Essential Tagore' Joins East and West "The Essential Tagore," a collection of work from Rabindranath Tagore published to mark the 150th birthday of the Bengali polymath, was formally released in Kolkata earlier this month. The result of collaboration between the Visva-Bharati University Publishing Department and Harvard University Press, the book seems to be aiming for the same synthesis of the East and the West that the Nobel laureate stood for. Published in two editions, South Asian and global, "The Essential Tagore" is an anthology of English translations of Mr. Tagore's writings across 10 genres. The global edition, at 864 pages, was published last year by Harvard, to great praise. American philosopher, writer and critic Martha Nussbaum nominated the book of the year in The New Statesman. In what the editors - Radha Chakravarty from India and Fakrul Alam from Bangladesh - describe as a "conjunction of stars," the anthology is a collaboration of 30 South Asians writers scattered across the globe, including Amitava Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunetra Gupta, Kaiser Haq and Syed Manzoorul Islam. The book is the largest single volume of Mr. Tagore's work available in English, "not just in size, but range and diversity too," Ms. Chakravarty said in an interview. At the core of the book, is a coming together of many types of Mr. Tagore's work - poetry, short stories, novels, dramas, travelogues, in what Ms. Chakravarty calls "Twelve dimensions of Tagore." The book also contains Mr. Tagore's letters, artworks and his own English translation of his Bengali originals. Some original works in English and three poems omitted from the published version of the English-language edition of "Gitanjali" have also been included. While the book includes the verse, "Aaji Jharer Raate," in both the poem and song forms to show how Mr. Tagore thought differently in different genres, it also carries two translations of the same poem, "Akash Bhara Surya Tara," one by Ratna Prakash and the other by Amit Chaudhuri to "demonstrate how Tagore can be translated in multifarious ways," Ms. Chakravarty said. "The idea was to strike at the roots of some popular Western stereotypes about Mr. Tagore such as the mystic, prophetic or wise man of the East and the exalted image of Gurudev as God," Ms. Chakravarty said. "We wanted to take a fresh look at Tagore for the 21st century readers and demonstrate how he was more than a kobi (poet)," she said. "We tried to achieve a judicious mix of popular and little-known Tagore's works," said Kumkum Bhattacharya, former director of the Visva-Bharati Publishing Department. While various approaches to translation were encouraged, being faithful to the text and avoiding extrapolation were emphasized. Ms. Bhattacharya said the book was not only targeted at initiating new readers - both Bengalis and non-Bengalis - to Mr. Tagore, but also unshackling the bard from the "restricted circle of aficionados" of Bengali literary establishment.