Where the Mind Is without Fear

Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

心無所畏時

泰戈爾

冰心譯

在那里，心是無畏的，頭也抬得高昂;

在那里，知識是自由的;

在那里，世界還沒有被狹小的家國的墻隔成片段;

在那里，話是從真理的深處說出;

在那里，不懈的努力向著“完美”伸臂;

在那里，理智的清泉沒有沉沒在積習的荒漠之中;

在那里，心靈是受你的指引，走向那不斷放寬的思想與行為——

進入那自由的天國，我的父呵，讓我的國家覺醒起來罷。

About the poet:

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was an Indian Bengali polymath. He was a popular poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright who reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", and as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Tagore was perhaps the most widely regarded Indian literary figure of all time. He was a mesmerizing representative of the Indian culture whose influence and popularity internationally perhaps could only be compared to that of Gandhi, whom Tagore named ’Mahatma’ out of his deep admiration for him.