Indiaclub.com Description

There have been many sides to William Radice's life and career - poetry, Bengali, Tagore, Germany, opera and more - and it has not been easy for his readers to keep up with them all. This book, for the first time, offers an overview, by combining lectures he has given on visits to the subcontinent with a variety of articles and autobiographical pieces.

In lectures from his Easter Tour of India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan in 2001, he sets out plans for the future as well as considering his work to date, asking whether it might be possible to more from post-modern confusion to a new kind of altruistic classicism. In 'Confession of a Poet-translator' he explains how all his work has striven for a balance of the moral, the creative and the rational. In essays on his teachers, on Betty Radice and Juan Mascoro, he movingly describes how he has been influenced by the. In pieces on his collaboration with the composer Param Vir, and on two poetic elegies, he takes us deep into his own creative processes. The centrality of the Tagore-Radice relationship is confirmed at the end of the book by two important lectures given in Stockholm.

Breaking down barriers between the literary and the academic, the analytic and the poetic, and East and West, this book is written throughout in Radice's characteristically personal, relaxed yet lucid style. Its unity and humanity are further enhanced by Chandanashis Laha's graceful and perceptive preface.`