“Five years after the Gitanjali, in 1917, Tagore, assisted by Evelyn Underhill, published an English translation of Kabir (the 14th-century Hindu-Muslim poet), a favorite of Rabindranath’s. Kabir’s poems are in Hindi. I assume that Tagore worked from a Bengali translation, but I do not know whose. Robert Bly then in 1971 began to rework Tagore’s translations to make The Fish in the Sea Is Not Thirsty (1972) and then in 1977 The Kabir Book, one of the most influential books of mystical poetry every published. Bly describes his process, ‘I simply put a few of them (poems of Kabir in Tagore’s English translations), whose interiors I had become especially fond of, into more contemporary language, to see what they might look like.’ So something of a full circle is going on here. I have come back around to working on my mentor and friend’s (Bly) mentor (Tagore’s Kabir). It is very probable, of course, that Kabir knew Rumi’s ecstatic poetry. Certainly Tagore did.”