Gitanjali

Gitanjali ("Song offering") is a collection of poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the English translation, Song Offerings. It is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Its central theme is devotion, and its motto is 'I am here to sing thee songs' (No. XV). The original Bengali collection of 156/157 poems was published on August 14, 1910.  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, and was 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.