'The Post Office'. A Play in Two Acts. Translated into Dutch by Henri Borel.
De Brief Van Den Koning 'The Post Office'. A Play in Two Acts. Translated into Dutch by Henri Borel.
De Hann, 1913.
Deluxe edition in Dutch. Square 8vo. Number three of two-hundred numbered copies signed by Rie Cramer. White cloth, with pictorial stamp in black and gold on the front board, gilt lettering on the spine, top edge gilt and the rest uncut. Six colour tipped-in plates and decorative black and white floral headers by Rie Cramer. Her delicate Art Nouveau style perfectly epitomises the sense of harmony with nature at the heart of the play. A very good copy with some wear to the spine ends.
Originally written in Bengali in 1911, this is a spiritual play about a child (Amal), who is confined to his uncle's home with an incurable disease. He watches the villagers pass, and dreams of the postman bringing him a letter from the King. In his introduction to the English version (1912), W.B. Yeats writes that the "play conveys to the right audience an emotion of gentleness and peace" which is epitomised by Amal's character.
Tagore was a Bengali polymath who also wrote poetry, music and plays. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), awarded for "his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."
Stock ID: 46118
