{"id":25321,"date":"2021-12-15T11:53:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T16:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=25321"},"modified":"2021-12-15T11:53:22","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T16:53:22","slug":"when-the-lotus-bloomed-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=25321","title":{"rendered":"When the Lotus Bloomed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thanks to Cambridge Arts’ Sidewalk Poetry<\/a> program, this poem is now imprinted in cement at Clarendon Ave. and Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge (Mass.). The text appeared first on my blog<\/a>. I meant to answer Rabindranath Tagore’s\u00a0Gitanjali<\/em>\u00a0#20, \u201cOn the Day When the Lotus Bloomed,\u201d which begins\u2014in Tagore\u2019s own translation from Bengali\u2014\u201cOn the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, Tagore’s English versions of his own verse are criticized for being sentimental, archaizing, and didactic and less challenging than the originals. For instance, Amit Chaudhuri writes<\/a>, “Tagore’s English version of the\u00a0Gitanjali<\/em>, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1913, is what Mother Teresa once was to Calcutta, the royal family to England, and Kingsley to Gandhi: a tantalising mirage that obstructs the view of what’s behind it.” My response, then, must be even further from Tagore’s Bengali original, which I cannot read. But I think these eight lines convey some of me, and I hope they offer a touch of peace in North Cambridge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Cambridge Arts’ Sidewalk Poetry program, this poem is now imprinted in cement at Clarendon Ave. and Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge (Mass.). The text appeared first on my blog. I meant to answer Rabindranath Tagore’s\u00a0Gitanjali\u00a0#20, \u201cOn the Day When the Lotus Bloomed,\u201d which begins\u2014in Tagore\u2019s own translation from Bengali\u2014\u201cOn the day when the lotus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25321"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25347,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25321\/revisions\/25347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}