But in the suicide belt of India, where dozens of farmers are pauperized by debt and driven into suicidal despair every day, they aren’t really looking for utopian “edification,” which the average politician can supply just as glibly as Rabindranath Tagore.

I’m not really trying to persuade you not to like a poem you like, and anyway William Butler Yeats is on your side, probably with just about the same set of reservations.

But admiration for one complex of qualities usually implies a devaluation of the opposite, and my taste in Indian literature is centered on Mirabai in medieval India, and the great contemporary Indian novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy, whose commitment to the ordinary lives of ordinary people like farmers in the suicide belt outweights any amount of grand “edification,” for me.

Existing English translations are so treacly and “edifying” that it’s tempting to blame them on the translators, but this is not only a mistake; it actually turns the real relation between Tagore and his best translator exactly upside down.

Juan Ramon Jimenez’ translations of Tagore into Spanish began with English versions prepared by Tagore himself, and Tagore was a peerlessly terrible translator of his own poems. Everything undergoes a Hallmark-card transmogrification: every child turns into a baby, every flower turns into a blossom, and in spite of a certain colonial obsequiousness in Tagore’s prefaces, his condescension to the target market of kitsch-intoxicated pre-WWI British readers is unmistakable.

Jimenez translated this rubbish into poetry literally as a labor of love for his co-translator and future wife, Zenobia Camprubi. The 22 volumes of Tagore they published together made her name familiar to readers from Cadiz to Tierra del Fuego, and established Rabindranath Tagore as a major influence on a whole generation of Spanish and Latin American poets.

This was a disaster for Juan Ramon Jimenez.

Tagore had been transformed into Jimenez so successfully that Jimenez disappeared. His own poetry looked like an afterthought to the inwardly inane but outwardly melodious and monumental Rabindranath Tagore, and it was only after dozens of other translators had failed to rediscover Jimenez’ poesía pura in the original Bengali that the real genius of Juan Ramon Jimenez was finally recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956.

When my great-uncle took a famous photograph of Albert Einstein, Einstein asked whom he had recently photographed. “Rabindranath Tagore,” said my great-Uncle, who then said something about Ramanujan from Tagore. It was sufficiently garbled by hearsay that Einstein said: “Oh. Simple arithmetic.”