The article examines and compares two translations of the same poem by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), produced by Boris Pasternak in the late 1950s and David Samoylov in mid-1960s, who both relied on line-by-line translation from Bengali. While Pasternak’s translation is a successful Russian poem on its own, it has little similarity with the original’s form and meaning. It may have been for this reason that D. Samoylov was commissioned to make a new translation. His version is closer to the original’s form, but fails to render the meaning. The article suggests that the meter chosen by Pasternak for the translation, with its ‘semantic aureole’ – ‘death (and its defeat)’, is more appropriate for the theme of the Bengali original.