---
title: Tagore Won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Poems He Had Translated Into English Himself
description: Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European Nobel laureate in 1913 for Gitanjali, poems he translated himself. How it happened and what followed.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-11-05T11:30:00.032Z
updated: 2026-11-05T11:30:00.039Z
canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/rabindranath-tagore-nobel-prize-gitanjali
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-34640247.webp
categories: Poets & Poetry
content_type: Feature
publication: The Quantum of Light
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Rabindranath Tagore
    description: Bengali poet, writer, composer and painter (1861 to 1941). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, becoming the first writer from outside Europe to receive it, and founded Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan.
    jobTitle: Poet, writer, composer and painter
    sameAs:
      - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1913/summary/
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore
---

On 13th November 1913, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet most of its members could read only in English. He was the first writer from outside Europe to win it, and the first Indian to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. The Academy praised his 'profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse', and added that he had made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, part of the literature of the West.

The phrase about his own English words is the heart of the story. Tagore was 52 and already the most celebrated writer in Bengal, with decades of poems, songs, plays and stories behind him. Almost none of it existed in English until he translated a selection himself, and that slim book won him the prize.

## A notebook of translations reached Yeats in London

The Bengali Gitanjali, a cycle of devotional songs, appeared in 1910. When Tagore sailed to England in 1912, he carried English prose versions of poems drawn from it and from other collections. The painter William Rothenstein, who had met him in Calcutta, passed them to W.B. Yeats, who was moved enough to write the introduction for a limited edition published by the India Society in London that November.

Macmillan published a general edition in March 1913, and it had been reprinted ten times before the Nobel announcement. The English Gitanjali is not a translation of the Bengali book of that name. It is a new collection, in plain rhythmic prose, assembled by the poet for readers who could not hear the rhyme and metre of the originals.

## One nomination was enough

Tagore had never been nominated before 1913. The single nomination came from the English poet Thomas Sturge Moore, and most members of the Academy knew his work only through those few English translations. The committee member Per Hallström argued that no European poet since Goethe could rival him, and the Academy passed over a field that included Thomas Hardy, whose work was judged too pessimistic for the terms of Alfred Nobel's will.

The choice surprised Europe. The Times called it unexpected but welcomed it, the New York Times compared him to Walt Whitman, and Le Figaro described him as an author with no significant world reputation. In Santiniketan, the rural school Tagore had founded in 1901, the news arrived by telegram. He did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony on 10th December, and gave his Nobel lecture there in 1921.

## What the prize paid for

Tagore put the prize money into Santiniketan, which grew into Visva-Bharati University in 1921. The British government knighted him in 1915. In 1919, after British troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, he wrote to the Viceroy to give the knighthood back.

## Why the West moved on and Bengal never did

The English Gitanjali made Tagore famous in Europe as a gentle Eastern mystic, and that image hardened fast. There is an argument that the translations themselves did the damage: in turning rhymed songs into devotional prose, Tagore gave Western readers a voice that sounded wise and timeless but lost the music, wit and variety of the Bengali. Yeats, his first champion, later lost patience with the translations that kept coming.

In Bengal, the music never left. Tagore wrote more than 2,000 songs, known as Rabindrasangeet, which are still sung across the region, and his words are the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. He took up painting seriously in his late sixties and left more than 2,000 pictures. The film director Satyajit Ray studied at Santiniketan and adapted Tagore's fiction for the screen, most famously in Charulata in 1964.

## The medal was stolen in 2004

On 25th March 2004, thieves took Tagore's Nobel medal and other belongings from a security vault at Visva-Bharati. The Swedish Academy gave the university two replicas, one in gold and one in bronze, on 7th December that year, and the original has never been found. The theft later inspired the Bengali film Nobel Chor.

A century on, the prize is about to go to another poet who works between languages. Anne Carson, a translator of Sappho and Euripides, receives the [2026 Nobel Prize in Literature](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/anne-carson-nobel-prize-literature-2026) in Stockholm on 10th December.

## FAQ

**Q: Why did Rabindranath Tagore win a Nobel Prize?**
Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his poetry, and in particular for Gitanjali: Song Offerings, a collection of his own English prose translations of Bengali poems published in 1912 with an introduction by W.B. Yeats. The Swedish Academy praised the sensitivity and freshness of his verse and the skill with which he made his poetic thought part of Western literature. He was the first writer from outside Europe to receive the prize.

**Q: What happened to Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Prize?**
Tagore's Nobel medal was stolen on 25th March 2004 from a security vault at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal, along with other personal belongings, and it has never been recovered. Later in 2004 the Swedish Academy presented the university with two replicas, one gold and one bronze, which are kept in the Tagore museum there. Tagore had used the prize money itself to develop the school that became Visva-Bharati.