Song Offerings
Song Offerings () is a volume of lyrics by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, rendered into English by the poet himself, for which he was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. Contents
Song Offerings is often identified as the English rendering of Gitanjali (), a volume of poetry by poet Rabindranath Tagore composed between 1904 and 1910 and published in 1910. However, in fact, Song Offerings anthologizes English translation of poems from his drama Achalayatan and nine other previously published volumes of Tagore poetry. The ten works, and the number of poems selected from each, are as follows:
 Gitanjali - 69 poems (out of 157 poems in Song Offerings)
 Geetmalya - 17 poems
 Naibadya - 16 poems
 Kheya - 11 poems
 Shishu - 3 poems
 Chaitali - 1 poem
 Smaran - 1 poem
 Kalpana - 1 poem
 Utsarga - 1 poem
 Acholayatan - 1 poem

Song Offerings is a collection of devotional songs to the supreme. The deep-rooted spiritual essence of the volume is brought out from the following extract :

(Poem 28, Song Offering)

The word gitanjali is composed from "geet", song, and "anjali", offering, and thus means – "An offering of songs"; but the word for offering, anjali, has a strong devotional connotation, so the title may also be interpreted as "prayer offering of song". Nature of translation
Rabindranath Tagore took the liberty of doing "free translation" while rendering these 103 poems into English. Consequently, in many cases these are transcreations rather than translation; however, literary biographer Edward Thomson found them 'perfect' and 'enjoyable'. A reader can himself realize the approach taken by Rabindranath in translating his own poem with that translated by a professional translator. First is quoted lyric no. 1 of Song Offering as translated by Rabindranath himself :

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, 
and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,
and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands 
my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill. It is the Lyric number 1 of Gitanjali. There is another English rendering of the same poem by Joe Winter translated in 1997:

Tagore undertook the translations prior to a visit to England in 1912, where the poems were extremely well received. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the English Gitanjali. 