Gitanjali [Song Offerings].

TAGORE, Rabindranath.

$4,000.00

Item Number: 130449

London: Printed at The Chiswick Press for The India Society, 1912.

First edition of this collection of prose translated by Tagore from the original Bengali, largely for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles to the spine and front panel, engraved frontispiece portrait of Tagore with tissue guard present. One of 750 copies printed for the India Society only 250 of which were available for sale. Introduction by W.B. Yeats. In very good condition. Bookplate and stamps for the Northbook Society (a British advocacy society and reading room for Indian literature, defunct in the 1960s). Rare and desirable.

Bengali poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore modernized and reshaped Bengali literature and music throughout the early 19th and late 20th centuries as a leading figure in the Contextual Modernist movement of West India. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the English Gitanjali.