The lover of God

"In 1875 a prominent Calcutta journal published a suite of poems by a "newly discovered" seventeenth-century Bengali poet, Bhanusimha. The poems were celebrated, yet, several years later, critics realized that they had been drawn in by an embarrassing deception: the poet did not exist and, perhaps worse, the true author was a precocious fourteen-year-old boy, Rabindranath Tagore." "These poems, which Tagore continually revised over the next sixty-five years, tell a story of love and longing through the songs of Lord Krsna's young lover Radha and her confidante Bhanu. They draw from Indian culture, history, and spirituality, and as the first and last poems that the Nobel Prize-winning Tagore wrote, they represent both entrance and exit for one of the most prolific literary lives in modern poetry." "This is The Lover of God's first appearance in English translation, the result of a long collabration between Bengali scholar Tony K. Stewart and the celebrated poet Chase Twichell. The poems are presented bilingually and are illuminated by an introduction and postscript, as well as the false biography Tagore for Bhanusimha."--BOOK JACKET.