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I'm not quite sure what to make of Farewell Song. Even more so than usual with Tagore, I feel myself stranded on alien shores, uncertain of what I’m missing. The tone of the novella escapes me. Tagore is clearly toying with the line between irony and sincerity, literary pretension and profundity. But where, precisely, is the line drawn? Am I meant to take the romance of this novella seriously? Or is it all affectation? Or is it all affectation and nonetheless serious? Our hero—is he a hero or an ass or both? And what of the constant meta references to Tagore himself? The protagonist—whose poetry, which may or may not be tongue in cheek, enlivens the novel—explicitly positions himself in opposition to Tagore, the literary celebrity. Is this a joke? If so, at whose expense?

I suspect the answers to all these questions would be clearer if only I read Bengali and had a real sense of its literary history. Alas. Still, Farewell Song is well worth reading, even if I found it far less immediately captivating than Tagore’s The Garden or The Broken Nest. Even on a surface level, it is a beautifully written story sprinkled with lovely poetry. There are moments when the humor sparkles, and moments when it hits in an ugly way that feels intentional (colonialism, dependence and independence are constant themes—there is a political heft here, which again, I fear eludes me in its particulars). But even a reader as ignorant as I can appreciate a glimpse through the fence at beauties inaccessible.