Gitanjali: A Creation or Translation?

Tagore’s Gitanjali, which won for him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, is actually a “translated” work by himself from Bengali, but quite different from the original in terms of material choice, textual form, narrative patterns or content framing.Tagore was not so much translating as creatively rewriting, regarding translation metaphysically and the original teleologically, which erases the boundary between translation and creation.This paper argues that the main reason for Tagore’s self translated English Gitanjali to be so widely and rapidly accepted by the West can be illustrated by the poetic norm of the reception context, ideology in the target culture, incorporation of the east and west religion and philosophy, and the “image” recalling of colonizer’s other.The paper consequently tries to redefine the literary translator’s identity, rethink those similar translation phenomena in history and reassess the longrun norm “faithfulness” historically and dynamically.