Nice Work Dylan, but Tagore Got There First

We all know the first songwriter to win the Nobel was NOT Bob Dylan, right? Of course that honor went to none other than poet, artist, songwriter, performer Rabindranath Tagore. Now that we're all on the same page, let's leap over to Los Angeles Review of Books where Caroline Eden digs into the matter:

THE FRACAS surrounding Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature shows no sign of cooling off. Writers and musicians are still coming out, picking sides and posturing. Stephen King showed his support in Rolling Stone magazine, writing: “People complaining about his Nobel either don’t understand or it’s just a plain old case of sour grapes.” Irvine Welsh, on the other hand, took to Twitter with a hard-hitting assessment befitting the author of Trainspotting: “I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”

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Dylan’s apparently frigid disinterest — and whether he is worthy of the award at all — has been analyzed thoroughly, but what caught my attention in the media melee was an interesting sideline debate that quietly bubbled away. Some people — including the novelist and singer Amit Chaudhuri (writing in the Guardian) — began to question whether or not this win really represented the first time the prize has gone to a songwriter, as many newspaper headlines claimed. This sounds like a straightforward enough question, but when you get into it, it isn’t.

Calcutta-born poet Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the prize in 1913. The Nobel website states that it was given to him “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.”

Tagore was a true multi-disciplinarian. He was a performer, essayist, artist, poet, as well as a lover of music and a fine, prolific writer of songs. He wrote in both Bengali and English and translated his own work. The title of his most famous creation, a collection of 103 lyric poems published in English in 1912, is Gitanjali: Song Offerings. Tagore had translated the work on his sick bed in Bengal, feeling too ill to work on new material. As the title suggests, much of the material contained therein are songs, albeit songs that Tagore converted into compositions that are meant to work as poetry without music. This collection — a small slice of his oeuvre, which includes 60 books of verse — almost certainly secured Tagore the prize. It throws into question the claim that Dylan is the first songwriter to win the Nobel in Literature. If this really was a collection of songs, then that’s it — Tagore had Dylan beat by over a century. And yet.

Head to LARB where Eden writes about an adoring Tagore fan, the enraptured W.B. Yeats, and for further consideration of the Tagore-Dylan connection.