Tagore in the land of Arabian Nights

No sooner had the Nobel Committee announced, on 13 November 1913, that Rabindranath Tagore had won the Nobel Prize for Literature than the news was broadcast to every country around the world. The Arabic-speaking world expressed its enthusiasm in an appropriate manner: The dailies of Egypt, Lebanon and several other Arab countries published the news with zeal and enthusiasm, presumably because Tagore was the first Asian to receive the award.
In addition to the Egyptian daily al-Ahram, many Egyptian journals of repute -- including al-Hilal, Saut al-Sharq, al-Jinan and al-Muqtataf -- published articles about Tagore. The next year, Wadi al-Bustani, a Lebanese writer and translator of Umar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat from Persian to Arabic, travelled to Calcutta and stayed as Tagore’s guest for two days. He was so charmed by his host’s disposition and erudition that he compared him to an angel on earth.
Al-Bustani was perhaps the first Arab to meet Tagore after he’d won the Nobel Prize and, after reading Gitanjali, The Gardener and Sadhana in English, he wrote a wonderful article in Arabic about the laureate. This homage was published in al-Hilal late in 1916. Soon afterwards, Bustani became the first to translate Gitanjali into Arabic.
Tagore travelled to Egypt in 1926 but did not mention this visit in his writing, except for a passing reference in Pareshey. Arabic sources reported that he landed at Alexandria and presented a lecture at the al-Hamra opera on 27 November 1926, during which he talked about the existence of God in every living being. On 29 November of that year, he gave another lecture, this time at Cairo’s Hadiqa al-Uzbukiyya opera; he spoke about the differences between Western and Eastern philosophies. Reporters for dailies from Egypt -- such as al-Balagh and al-Ahram -- and other Arab countries covered his talks with zeal.

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He has the unique distinction of being the only poet in the world whose poems are sung as the national anthems of two independent countries (India and Bangladesh), crossing geographical, linguistic and intellectual boundaries. He is equally well-loved in the land of the Arabian Nights: a number of Arab countries celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth with gaiety and respect.

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Tagore poems at Occupy Poetry