Book Review of 'Farewell Song' (translated from Shesher Kabita by Tagore)

Rabindranath Tagore was a great short story writer, playwright, novelist, essayist and composer of beautiful songs apart from being an immensely versatile poet.
Shesher Kabita was written by Tagore in 1928 and is a very surprising offering from Tagore when he was under the scanner and was being criticed over his age and retirement from writing particularly by the Kallol group and others and his reputation in the west was also dwindling. His writings were continuously attacked by critics for using colloquial Bengali.
Out of the insecurity caused by all this criticism, Shesher Kabita is an answer from Tagore defending his standing as a poet. The way it has been written I found Shesher Kabita as a very clever and innovative idea from a veteran poet to silence his critics.

Farewell Song is a very accomplished translation from Bengali by Radha Chakravarty as it tries it's best to keep the romance as well as satire in the original novel intact.
The story starts as a tender romantic novel with Amit and Labanya as the main characters where they have a slowly unfolding romantic start. However soon enough the author takes the reader back in time to show each of their pasts, that is, their past lovers. A very strong bond starts to form between the two, but their past starts to crop up  between their relationship. Labanya is a wise and strong charactered woman, as is the case in most of Tagore's other stories and she wants to give their relationship more time before she commits further. In between all this, Tagore has meticulously incorporated the main objective of his novel, which was to silence his critics and this  he did by assigning Amit the side of his critics and used Labanya as a device to voice out his defense for continuing to write even at a very old age with a dwindling reputation.
The story narrows to the end as their past seperates the two main characters and they go their own seperate ways before writing to each other beautiful and touching poems, which
justify the title of the book, Farewell Song.
I found the book captivating from a poet's point of view and more importantly it is a masterpiece, an excellent example that really makes 'the pen mightier than a sword' as Tagore uses his pen to silence his critics.

- by Shivank Rawat