A major obstacle to world-wide understanding of Tagore has always been ignorance among non-Bengalis of the Bengali language. At the height of his Nobel Prize induced, globe-trotting fame, this was not felt as such an obstacle, which meant that a lot of nonsense was written about him, especially by his admirers. It appears that neither of the editors of the present volume knows Bengali. Even the Indian co-editor, Lalita, Pandit, in her essay of ‘The psychology and aesthetics of love’ in Gora, says in a note that she used the ‘1910 translation…by the author himself’ (in fact it was translated by W.W. Pearson, assisted by Surendranath Tagore), the 199 translation by Sujit Mukerjee, and the 1961 Hindi translation by Ajneya. But this does not necessarily matter if all such writers recognize the limitations of working on Tagore from the available translations. (Those who know another Indian language are in a stronger position, because the gulf between the original and the translation is often less wide: Lalita Pandit can justifiable write in such aesthetic detail about Gora because Ajneya spoke Bengali fluently, having lived with a Bengali family in Assam in the 1940s, and he translated Gora directly from the Bengali.) Writing about Tagore without Bengali becomes hardest and riskiest when it reaches to the heart of all his endeavours: his poetry and song. Wisely, the editors and most of the contributors avoid this, and even the one who does stray near-Purnima Mehta, I her essay on ‘Childhood loss and mourning reaction in Tagore’s poetry’, just about gets away with is by using Tagore’s own translations in The Crescent Moon (1913) as material for a Freudian discussion of the bereavement rather than for literary criticism as such.