The Picture of My Early Life presents an opportunity to the English-speaking global audience to discover Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of universal humanity with a hope that it also helps to dispel the notion that Tagore was solely a mystic poet.

Rabindranath Tagore’s The Picture of My Early Life (Jibansmriti) was published just before Tagore was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

An unconventional autobiography, The Picture of My Early Life, is a rambling series of ‘memory pictures’ that the great litterateur and thinker chronicled covering the first twenty-seven formative years of his life. The descriptions are insightful, informative of the period and are wrapped in wry and self-deprecating humour. The use of conjugated words together with a complex prose structure makes it a timeless literary creation where not a word or punctuation feels out of place.

In this translation, every attempt has been made to be true to the original and to preserve the finer nuances to the extent possible in another language.

Prasenjit Saha, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India is an engineer by profession who feels strongly about promoting Bengali literature to the world. After translating Rabindranath Tagore's Jibansmriti, Prasenjit is currently working on the translation of Parthiba by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay.

Patrick Colm Hogan is a Professor in the Department of English, the Programme in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the India Studies Programme at the University of Connecticut, USA. Patrick’s research centres around World Literature with particular reference to South Asian Culture.

Rabindranath Tagore disliked formal schooling, especially being in a class room. He set up a school himself in Santiniketan with a very different approach. He wrote about his early years, and there is an excellent recent translation, The Picture of My Early Life, by Prasenjit Saha (who is an engineer with a passion for the literature of his mother tongue).

Robert Dyson, The Guardian

Prasenjit Saha has done a tremendous service to the readers of Tagore. This sensitive, carefully done, and authentic translation of Jibansmriti, the only autobiography that Tagore wrote, brings the text alive.

Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics and Political Science

It is lovely. You have done a magnificent job. The English-speaking world will be enriched if you translate more works from Bengali.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

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