I had been tempted to read something by Rabindranath Tagore next. I chose “Paper Boats.”
The poem began in Bengali. The English version was published in The Crescent Moon, whose title page credits Tagore himself as the translator. I began with that English version before looking closely at the Bengali poem.
The poem
Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running stream.
In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of the village where I live.
I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who I am.
I load my little boats with shiuli flowers from our garden, and hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried safely to land in the night.
I launch my paper boats and look up into the sky and see the little clouds setting their white bulging sails.
I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down the air to race with my boats!
When night comes I bury my face in my arms and dream that my paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars.
The fairies of sleep are sailing in them, and the lading is their baskets full of dreams.
First reading
There are little “slice of life” poems that perfectly capture a feeling, a moment, a culture or a way of being. This feels like one of those poems.
I can picture a young boy by a stream, shirtless in my imagination for some reason, setting his little boats afloat in the hope that they might find someone else. That he sees the clouds in the sky as sails suggests a loneliness to me, one that a wandering and inventive child’s mind is able to fill.
Comparing the Bengali and English versions
Calling the English a translation is perhaps too simple. The Bengali poem has five twelve-line stanzas. The published English version recasts it as eight short prose paragraphs. The journey survives, but much of the day surrounding it disappears.
In Bengali, the child carefully draws large, thick letters on each boat and imagines a stranger reading them and guessing where the boat came from. He fills the boats with both shiuli and bakul flowers gathered from beneath the garden trees, still shining with morning dew. The English keeps the name, the village and the shiuli, but compresses the rest into a few sentences.
The Bengali child then sits on the bank and watches. Small waves rise and fall, sunlight glitters on the water, birds call overhead and the breeze moves slowly. He sees that the clouds look like his boats and wonders who launched them, where they are going and whether the clouds or his boats will arrive first. The English replaces this with the lovely invention of the clouds setting their “white bulging sails” and an unknown playmate sending them to race his boats.
The largest omission comes when the day ends. In a close, deliberately plain rendering, the Bengali says:
At the end of the day someone comes from home
and pulls me away.
I return home and stay tucked away in a corner,
where day passes and night passes.
Where, towards what village,
does my little boat keep floating?
No one knows which way it will go.
No one ever forbids it,
no one holds it or calls it back.
It runs towards ever-new countries.
My mind climbs aboard the paper boat
and floats away with it.
The Bengali ending is darker and more particular too. The child imagines a river whose banks have been poured from ink. Stars flicker and jackals call through the watches of the night. The boat seems to search from shore to shore for a home. A familiar Bengali figure, the sleep-bringing auntie, climbs aboard carrying sleep with her.
The published English version turns her into “the fairies of sleep” and gives them baskets full of dreams. It is a beautiful ending, but it is not merely the same ending in another language.
What I learned
The Bengali poem, “Kagojer Nouka,” appeared in Shishu, Tagore’s 1903 collection about childhood. Ten years later, “Paper Boats” appeared in The Crescent Moon, soon after the success of the English Gitanjali.
There is a wrinkle. The Crescent Moon is dedicated to the British poet and artist T. Sturge Moore, an early champion of Tagore who nominated him for the 1913 Nobel Prize. A surviving English manuscript of “Paper Boats” shows that its wording changed before publication. I cannot tell from it who made each change, so I cannot claim that Tagore personally chose every cut. All I can say for certain is that these lines disappear from the published English poem.
That only makes my question more interesting. This is the English poem Tagore authorized and published under his own name, but it is a recreation rather than a literal copy of the Bengali. Perhaps it can be the same poem without being quite the same experience.
Rereading it
The full Bengali version adds to my sense of the boy’s loneliness, but it also makes him feel trapped and stuck at home. It makes his living vicariously through the boats, set free to explore the world, make all the more sense.
Those verses disappear from the English version. Could a poem with so much lost in translation still be said to be the same poem?
In spite of those lines being cut, the meaning and feeling still seem to get through, at least for me.
The line or image I kept thinking about
For me, it is the image of a series of small paper boats, each carrying this boy’s name, being buffeted and blown along by a current beyond their control as they explore the world. It feels both lonesome and full of promise.