Farewell My Friend (Rabindranath Tagore)

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The original Bengali novel Shesher Kavita (lit. Last Poem) was published in 1929. The author draws an amusing picture of an ultra-modern Bengali intellectual whose Oxford education, while giving him a superiority complex, has induced in him a craze for conscious originality which results in a deliberate and frivolous contrariness to all accepted opinion and convention. His aggressive self-complacence, however, receives a shock when as the result of an accidental meeting he falls in love with, and wins in return the heart of, a quite different product of modern culture - a highly educated girl offline sensibility and deep feelings. This love being more or less genuine and different from his previous experience of coquetry, releases his own submerged depth of sincerity, which he finds hard to adjust to the habits of sophistry and pose, practised so long.

In the process he manages to strike a new romantic attitude. The struggle makes of him a curiously pathetic figure - one who is being worked against his grain. The tragedy is understood by the girl, who releases him from his troth and disappears from his life. The last poem which she addresses to her lover gives evidence of the depth of feeling of which she was capable.

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath. As a poet, novelist, musician, and playwright, he reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", being the first non-European to win the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, Tagore was perhaps the most important literary figure of Bengali literature.

The original Bengali novel Shesher Kavita (lit. Last Poem) was published in 1929. Its modern setting, its playful mocking tone, its challenging style, the author's trick of introducing himself as the butt of the hero's merciless criticism, the brilliant sparkling wit of the dialogue and the final tragic note voiced in the beautiful poem which gives the book its title-all these won for the novel an immediate popularity with the young readers. Some admirers even acclaimed it as the author's best novel; but the enthusiasm of the young, and specially the modern young, must be accepted with considerable caution. The novel is undoubtedly brilliant and entertaining, but to regard it as better than Gora or The Home and the world is to prefer cleverness to genius. However, literary values can never be absolute. To each the pleasure of his choice.

The author draws an amusing picture of an ultra-modern Bengali intellectual whose Oxford education, while giving him a superiority complex, has induced in him a craze for conscious originality which results in a deliberate and frivolous contrariness to all accepted opinion and convention. His aggressive self-complacence, however, receives a shock when as the result of an accidental meeting he falls in love with, and wins in return the heart of a quite different product of modern culture-a highly educated girl of fine sensibility and deep feelings. This love being more or less genuine and different from his previous experience of coquetry, releases his own submerged depth of sincerity, which he finds hard to adjust to the habits of sophistry and pose, practised so long. In the process he manages to strike a new romantic attitude. The struggle makes of him a curiously pathetic figure-one who is being worked against his grain. The tragedy is understood by the girl, who releases him from his troth and disappears from his life. The last poem which she addresses to her lover gives evidence of the depth of feeling of which she was capable.

Much more than the development of the plot of the novel, it is the form of its presentation, the artistry of the author's style, the exquisite poetry interwoven with scintillating, sophisticated prose, the half-lyrical, half- mocking tone of the narrative, which startle the reader and give the novel its distinction. Unfortunately, it is precisely these virtues which, as it were, evaporate in the process of being rendered in an alien medium like English, whose spirit and idiom are so entirely different from those of the original. However, what has been found possible to retain is here presented, with the hope that the reader will not judge the novel without having read the original Bengali version.