Gitanjali Across Worlds: How Translation Became Transcreation

Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali has long been celebrated as a milestone of spiritual lyricism and modern Indian identity. Yet the creative metamorphosis through which its Bengali verses became an English world classic remains underexplored. This book, Gitanjali Across Worlds: How Translation Became Transcreation, re-examines Gitanjali as a living text that moves across languages, cultures, and aesthetic systems. Combining translation theory, comparative poetics, and digital humanities, it traces how Tagore's act of self-translation evolves into a process of transcreation-where poetry becomes re-imagined art. From Bengali manuscripts to English publications, from Rabindra Sangeet to global adaptations, this work reveals how one text continually transcends linguistic borders to embody the idea of transliterature: literature that exists between languages and beyond nations. This is a ground-breaking seminal study of Tagore's genius as a translator, poet, and cultural bridge between East and West.