William Radice, the English poet, Tagore translator, and scholar of Bengali language and literature passed away on November 10. He was 73.
I was his oldest Bengali friend, but I never worked out what led him to make Bengali the focus of his life’s work. I honestly can claim no part. The Bangladesh liberation movement took place when he was an English student at Oxford. It made waves in England and Oxford, far beyond the South Asian community. William was deeply involved, not just politically but also morally; he was viscerally disturbed by the agony of the nation struggling to be born. My best conjecture is that the strong cultural currents of the movement led him to a deeper interest in the language and literature of the region. In later years, he interacted equally with both Bengals, east and west.
The interest took time to grow, mediated at first through the English language. Meanwhile, William became a schoolteacher, and then (what few know) a trained psychiatric nurse. He married his Oxford contemporary Elizabeth Stephenson, who combined her own impressive college record and sober career as a teacher and principal with unfailing support for William’s idiosyncratic trajectory. This never appeared more clearly than when William returned to student life to read Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.
The Bengali programme at SOAS was then conducted by Tarapada Mukherjee. A distinguished scholar, Mukherjee lamented the dearth of inspiring students in his department. William’s arrival was like manna to him. He had developed his own method of teaching Bengali, which he tried out to best purpose on William. It may have given the latter some leads for his own Teach Yourself Bengali, published much later. He was also Tarapada Babu’s natural successor at SOAS.
Translating Tagore
In those years of apprenticeship, William made long visits to Kolkata, Dhaka, and Santiniketan, immersing himself in Bengali life and the working reality of the language. He became virtually a member of our family, talking exclusively in Bengali to practise the language. He was present at my wedding and my mother’s cremation. It was thanks to his and Elizabeth’s unstinting hospitality that I could make several library trips to England on my own academic work. This article is not a personal memoir, but 54 years’ friendship calls for this much remembrance.
Manuscript of Tagore’s epigrams and short verse. Translation of most of these brief poems can be found in William Radice’s book, The Jewel That Is Best (Penguin India). | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Meanwhile, another factor came into play, almost startlingly soon. Particularly to Indians, William’s work on Tagore has overshadowed the fact that he is an established poet in English, with eight volumes of poetry to his credit. His poetic impulses were fired by Rabindranath Tagore: he decided on an audacious project to render Tagore in a new English idiom for the contemporary international readership.
Radice’s Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories came out in 1991. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
The reception of Tagore’s English writings, especially his own translations of his poetry, underwent a sharp rise and fall. Commencing on a high note with the Nobel Prize, continuing with volume after volume consolidating his image as poet and oriental sage, extending through translations in other languages almost always made from the English, his appeal faded as new currents of modernist poetry swept the West. The unfailing robustness, variety, and innovation of his Bengali oeuvre over a poetic life of 60 years and more remained unsuspected by the world.
Radice endeavoured to reflect this variety, insofar as possible, in some 50 poems out of Tagore’s 4,500, in his translations in Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (1985). Still more ambitiously, he attempted to find living English correlatives for all these veins. This is where his skills as an original English poet worked to good purpose. Exploiting the double prerogative of young age and old friendship, I would sometimes remind him that it might also impede the correlation. Our sparring-matches continued all through our friendship, amazingly without jeopardising it. They became two-directional after I too joined the translator’s trade. Yet through it all, I could not but admire the independent creative dimension he brought to his renderings, where I could not follow him.
Cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, translated by Radice. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Radice followed up his first volume with Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories (1991). He went on to translate two Tagore plays,The Post Office (1995)and Card Country (2008), and three volumes of brief epigrammatic poems as Particles, Jottings, Sparks (2008).In 2011 camehis most substantial contribution to Tagoreana, a new translation of the poems in the English Gitanjali (a different collection from the Bengali volume so titled). Radice’s versions are placed alongside those in Tagore’s original manuscript, with the latter’s reworked texts in the printed 1912 volume in an appendix. Apart from the appeal of the new translations, this volume is an invaluable tool to sort out the tangle of texts and editions enwrapping the Bengali and English Gitanjalis. William was given to saying, “I am a poet, not a scholar”, to justify his distinctive take in his translations. But, of course, he was both, and in the Gitanjali compendium, hecombines the roles with aplomb.
Poet, pianist and gardener
Much earlier, he had affirmed his scholarly standing by an Oxford D.Phil.—not on Tagore but on the first poetic genius of the Bengal Renaissance, Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Oxford did not have a Bengali faculty: William was supervised by the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri. In fact, William had begun translating Dutt’s Meghnadbadh Kabya before turning to Rabindranath. It was completed and published much later as The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad. The challenge of translating Dutt’s sonorous blank verse, intricate syntax and innovative vocabulary is daunting even to think of. In my judgment, Meghnad marks the high point of William’s translating career.
Penguin Classics edition of The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad, Radice’s translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnadbadh Kabya. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
But it is for Tagore that he will most be remembered. As explained above, Tagore had largely slipped below the West’s radar. Radice’s achievement, beyond the intrinsic value of his rich renderings, was to reinstate Tagore on the Western literary map. Tagore translations abound today, as the works are out of copyright. But till 2001, translations (and recordings of Tagore songs) needed clearance from Tagore’s university, Visva-Bharati. William’s persistence, and his circle of admiring readers, ensured this was forthcoming. Only friends and family knew of the tension it caused him.
The honours he received from both Bengals might have reduced the tension in someone less sensitive. He won the prestigious Ananda Puraskar early on, followed by several other awards and honorary degrees from both Bengals and beyond. On his visits to Kolkata, he was lionised almost to his alarm till he learnt to handle his fan club.
The climactic storm scene in Snatched by the Gods, 2001, directed by Pierre Audi. | Photo Credit: https://paramvir.net/
I have no space to talk about his English poems or his love of music. An accomplished pianist, he collaborated with the London-based composer Param Vir in Snatched by the Gods, an operatic redaction of Tagore’s “Debatar gras” in Radice’s rendering. He also made a children’s opera from a folk tale in the classic collection, Tuntunir Boi, by Satyajit Ray’s grandfather, Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri, translated by Radice as The Stupid Tiger and Other Tales.
William Radice was a keen baker and gardener, the model of a male homemaker (which he was for some years, and never lost his touch), a loving and assiduous husband, father and grandfather, and a warm and generous friend. He will dwell in many hearts no less than in the annals of literary translation and cultural relations between Bengal and Europe.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Emeritus Professor of English, Jadavpur University. He has translated extensively from Tagore and other writers.
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