‘Even So, Remember Me’

Rabindranath Tagore  playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter.  He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful” poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his “elegant prose and magical poetry” remain largely unknown outside Bengal. – Wikipedia

My father liked the work of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore , so my brothers and I knew his work well even though it wasn’t mentioned in any of our high school or college literature courses. My favorite poem/song by Tagore was “Even So, Remember Me.” There are multiple translations of the work online, but the only one I like is by Bengali author (a favorite of mine) Sunetra Gupta. You can see her translation here.

In spite of changing times and changing ideas and points of view, we all hope that those we loved will remember us fondly in later years. The hope of that is the power of this poem.

Gupta and I have corresponded and once planned to meet when she was in Georgia for a medical conference–her primary field–but schedules changed and we couldn’t manage it. What a loss. Even so, I sent her an old copy of Tagore’s work that I inherited from my father since Gupta is a well-known translator of Tagore’s work.

Her work at Oxford as an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology in the department of zoology takes her away from her novels, the last of which was So Good in Black which came out in 2009.  I’ve been waiting for something new from her!

Meanwhile, I love reading her Tagore translations on her website and hope that she will remember me.

–Malcolm