TITLE: Gitanjali and Fruit-Gathering
AUTHOR: Rabindranath Tagore
PUBLISHER: MacMillan and Co., Limited
PLACE: London
YEAR: 1919
BINDING: Clothbound with gilted lettering and decoration to front board and spine
NO.OF PAGES:
SIZE:
Height: 19.5 cm
Width: 13.7 cm
Depth: 3 cm

THE BOOK COMES ALONG WITH A TIPPED IN PAGE WITH TWO LINES OF POEM IN BENGALI IN TAGORE'S HAND ALONG WITH HIS ORIGINAL SIGNATURE AND ILLUSTRATED BY NANDALAL BOSE ( PRINTED)

ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE POEM :
Come and listen to the poet
A tree gets fulfilment with the dancing flowers on its branches
The sun gets liberation with the dancing light of the day break
The dancing stars give liberation to the open sky from timeto time
10.10.1936

Please note that sun is Rabi in Bengali and it is also the poet's name.

Macmillan first published Tagore's "Gitanjali" 1913 and his "Fruit Gathering" in 1916. The first combined edition was published by Macmillanin 1918, and neither book in English translation corresponds to any of Tagore's works in Bengali. "Gitanjali" was first published in Bengali in 1910, then containing 157 Poems. As first published in English (1912), the work contained 103 Poems, 50 ofwhich were taken from the Bengali edition and 53 of which were gathered from Tagore's other works. "Fruit-Gathering" is in its entirety as gathering of various Tagore poems from other works.

Rabindranath Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West".

In presenting the Prize to Tagore, Harald Hjarne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, stated: "In awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Anglo-Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, the Academy has found itself in the happy position of being able to accordthis recognition to an author who, in conformity with the express wording of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, had during the current year, written the finest poems of an idealistic tendency...Tagore's Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), a collection of religious poems, was the one of his works that especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics."