SPARKLE(A Literary Translation of Tagore’s Poems)
by SUKUMAR SARKAR

Page:- 125 B & W Inside
During his travel in China and Japan, Tagore had to respond to many autograph-seekers who desired him to write few lines of poems inBengali along with his signature in their autograph books or on their favorite collection of pieces of silk cloth or on fancy hand fans. In this process of favouring few lines for them Tagore got used to writing pieces of small poems that amused him a lot. It was at times more endearing to him to express certain burst of emotions and thoughts in few poetic lines without using excess loads of words, than resorting to voluminous writings. He also felt that sometime we mostly failed to do justice to small sized writings because of our excessive indulgence to big ones.
He observed that in Japan smaller pieces of artistic creations got sufficient appreciation as because Japanese were good connoisseur of art and had ability to see magnanimity of bigs through the lens of small ones. They disliked to assess the things of beauty with measuring scales or weights. Tagore very much liked this sense of culture of Nippon people. So, whenever someone in Japan demanded any piece of poems from Tagore, he did not hesitate to write few lines of verses for them.
After getting used to such rendition of small verses on request from autographer seekers, Tagore’s own interest in such small poems grew to an extent that he on his own thereafter started composing such small poems independent of anybody’s request.
Earlier however, prior to his visit to China and Japan, Tagore had scripted few small poems in response to requests from local autograph seekers.
Most of such poems of Tagore, are now collected together in The ‘Sphulinga’, a book of small verses. ‘Sphulinga’ literally means spark or sparkle. Truly ‘Sphulinga’ is a bouquet of sparkles of varied musings of Tagore.