On this day, the Australian daily The Argus, published from Melbourne, carried the news of Rabindranath Tagore receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, announced two days earlier.
The report, with a London dateline, headlined ‘Rabindranath Tagore, Awarded Nobel Prize, Great Bengalese Poet’, quoted the Irish poet W.B. Yeats on Tagore and also briefly from Tagore’s poems.
“Mr Tagore is a member of a family highly distinguished in Bengal. He visited England recently, receiving a warm welcome from leading literary men,” the report commented.
It quoted Yeats as saying “I have carried the MS of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, on the top of omnibuses, and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.”
The report added: “The translation is indeed, strangely moving, even deprived as it is of the original’s ‘subtlety of rhythm, untranslatable delicacies of colour and metrical
invention’. Many of the lines are strikingly like the Song of Solomon in both sentiment and imagery.”