Addendum to The Three Schoolfellows

Continued from here.

Note from the Translator:

Whenever, in the Islamic world, a poet puts to pen a quatrain too hedonistic, too irreverent, or too atheistic — yet also too beautiful to deny the world — he attributes his work to Omar Khayyam, whose legacy in Persia is beyond all reproach.

These “wandering quatrains” constitute the greater part of the surviving corpus; of every ten poems attributed to Omar Khayyam, perhaps nine are pseudoepigraphical. Rather than diminish our account of his authorship, however, this should glorify it: Omar Khayyam became a share-name sheltering the Epicurean spirits of skepticism, sensuality, and science under seven suffocating centuries of Islamic dogma … we submit that the freethinking mathematician could ask for no nobler legacy.

Seven centuries pass. Born to a formidable heiress — the wealthiest commoner in England — is Edward FitzGerald. Melancholic, desultory, and almost certainly homosexual, he graduates from idleness to eccentricity. He is friends with great men of letters (Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle, and more) but holds strange habits: upon buying a painting, he picks up the knife and brush to correct it; he offends the authors in his anthologies by rewriting their work to his own taste — taste in which he has supreme confidence.

An old schoolfellow of his unearths a Persian manuscript in an Oxford library. The schoolfellow’s first attempts at translation reveal an attitude too unorthodox for his Christian soul, but verse perhaps too beautiful to deny the world — and he remembers odd old friend FitzGerald, unfailingly frank in his unbelief and, of course, an unashamed libertine.

The effect of these verses on that sensitive Englishman cannot be estimated. We imagine FitzGerald, who has always felt foreign from his countrymen, hunched over the hundred or so quatrains with a dictionary painstakingly lifting the poems from seven centuries past and slowly realizing they chart the contours of his soul.

He emerges from his study to a flush and newly beating world. His thoughts are colored by exotic impressions; the nightingale and the rose, the ruby in the vine, and the white hand of moses blooming from the bough. He glimpses in that cloud of quatrains the possibility of a grand ordering — like pearls along a string — opening with the image of dawn and closing with that of nightfall, the tomb, and the downturned glass. He busies himself with its fruition.

While translation as an art is largely practised by dull and slavish minds whose only chance at touching greatness is in its midwivery, or carriage, FitzGerald is unerring and freewheeling as ever; he tears quatrains apart, stitches them together, and invents more out of whole cloth. He writes:

I suppose very few people have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Costs, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the Originals better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.

The result is euphoric. From the intersection of souls of a Victorian eccentric and an 11th century Persian polymath springs a work of transcendental beauty. One feels that writing FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam must have felt like touching God. Translations more respectful, more accurate, more authentic to the text ring leaden by comparison; FitzGerald, animated by the same spirit as Omar Khayyam, or inventing it, seems to — by chance or fate — .

amanuesis.

FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam becomes the best-selling poetry collection in history; both become household names. More than anything, it becomes fashion. Across the world sprout “Omar Khayyam Clubs” devoted to appreciating, in company, all things Oriental and Epicurean.

recitation rendition translation what “Old Khayyam”

aesthetic vision. A spate of new translations.

(Preface to Le Gallienne’s Rubaiyat, a rendition of FitzGerald’s already loose translation:

As for that very minor matter, my Persian, I would put it to my friends of the Omar Khayyám Club — whether Persian be any ‘necessary adjunct or true ornament’ of your true Omarian. Indeed, I have a notion — which, of course, may be quite erroneous — that a knowledge of Persian disqualifies one for membership in that genial society. It would seem a sort of unkindness towards FitzGerald — as suggesting, what it is the growing fashion to forget, that there ever was any such person as Omar at all.”

if not happy, then knowing that he not so alien infectious. Today, it is mostly forgotten.

Note from the Translator:

But soon enough seven centuries will pass again. Then, perhaps, someone will pick up a copy of the Rubaiyat, an ancient book in an aged language called English, and they will translate the verse slowly, amateurishly, but glimpse the same vision that seized Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald centuries apart, and conceive of an even greater work.

And so on to infinity.

Note from the author: Welp, didn’t finish this in time (the 9pm deadline took me by surprise; I blocked out time until midnight), but I’ll return to it and polish it up during Inkhaven. Submitting the draft because I really need to keep that money!

And so on to infinity.