The Gardener (1915) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore and dedicated to Irish poet W. B. Yeats, The Gardener is a collection of earlier poems republished following his ascension to international fame with the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature. When Yeats discovered Tagore’s work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore’s poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless. Whether or not we admit it, his words never fail to remind us: to be human is to be vulnerable. “In the morning I cast my net into the sea. I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty—some shone like a smile, some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride. […] Then the whole night through I flung them one by one into the street. In the morning travellers came; they picked them up and carried them into far countries.” In his landmark collection Gitanjali, Tagore explored the realm of the spirit, paring down language to its clearest, purest form. In The Gardener, he gives expression to more worldly themes. Here, he is a fisherman, a restless wanderer, a servant and queen, an observer of life in all forms. This edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
