Betzi’s Poetry Blog: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald Translation, 1st edition, selected quatrains:
51:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
14:
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.
49:
‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
52:
And that inverted bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
11:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou,
Beside me singing in the Wilderness
And oh, Wilderness is Paradise enow. (enough)
27:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out of the same Door as in I went.
28:
With them the Seed of Wisdom I did sow,
And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reaped
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
73:
Ah, Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
Omar Khayyam, the brilliant Persian astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, poet, and, at least in the “Rubáiyát,”profound sceptic, was born in 1048 and died in 1131. He wrote many significant and influential treatises on mathematics, especially on algebra and helped with Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah I’s reform of the Iranian calendar.
Khayyam’s poetry, which was unpopular in his day, due undoubtedly to his skeptical and even heretical views on religion, reached a world-wide audience centuries after its initial composition via its translation into English by Edward FitzGerald, an English scholar from an extremely wealthy Victorian family. The first edition of FitzGerald’s translation was published in 1859; its popularity grew slowly but steadily.
His translation of Khayyam’s poems can be thought of as more of a collaboration, although carried on long after Khayyam’s death. FitzGerald used the word “transmogrification” to typify his work. “Transmogrification” has a humorous connotation and means “to transform, especially in a surprising, or magical manner.” (OED) He brings Khayyam’s poems to life in English, in what we today call a “version,” rather than a strict translation. “I have…taken great pains in Translation… though certainly not to be literal… at all Cost, a Thing must live…Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.” FitzGerald had a great sympathy for Khayyam’s skeptical sensibility, and so was primed in a sense, to make a stunning connection across the vast distances between their times and cultures. (A famous quote that shows a bit of Mr. FitzGerald’s wit and personality claims that he said “all my relatives are mad; further, I am insane myself, but at least am aware of the fact..”)
“The Rubáiyát” gives us a good example of the distance we have to assume between the speaker of a poem and the person who writes it. By all accounts, Khayyam lived an extremely industrious and intellectually vigorous life; it’s hard to imagine the same man who wrote detailed critiques of Euclid’s Elements, turning around and writing to advise a reader of his poems toward a dissolute, or at least a highly sensual, life, featuring the imbibing of wine, and the spending of time reading poetry (oh, my) with beautiful young women, etc. And yet this is the overall message of “The Rubáiyát”: live for today, for all life is fleeting in a world barren of spiritual truth. Khayyam is very tuned into what the Buddhists call Impermanence, the ever-changingness of all phenomena, without the Buddha’s consoling vision and teaching of an ethical path and a practice of meditation designed to greatly reduce the human suffering Khayyam observes and bemoans in his poems. But even though I do not share Khayyam’s disillusionment, I find that the beauty of his images and the power of his pointed skeptical observations generate enormous ongoing pleasure for me.
The depth of Khayyam’s dismay, and perhaps even despair, can be explained with an understanding of the turbulent, violent, and chaotic nature of his era. Just before he was born, his home, Nishapur, was devastated by invasion from the West by the Saljug Turks, and he grew up in a world ruled under their alien thumb. After his death, the Mongols invaded from the East. (In this regard, Persia seems to resemble the Poland of our modern era, invaded by the Germans, then the Russians, then the Germans again, etc. Interestingly, in both cultures, poetry flourished during these times of foreign oppression.) For more background, let me recommend another notable translation of “The Rubáiyát” by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, available from Penguin Classics. Their introduction elucidates Khayyam’s life and circumstances, and their translation strives to be more literal than FitzGeralds, providing a nice complementarity between the two.
And to the point of the ease of memorization, all the quatrains stand on their own, in spite of having been loosely placed in a kind of sequence by FitzGerald, and therefore can be memorized one at a time. Pick your favorite and then maybe go on to another. (Rubai is the singular in Persian for a quatrain; rubáiyát is the plural. The rhyme scheme is usually: aaba, but sometimes takes the form of a mono-rhyme: aaaa.) Enjoy!
(Also, I recommend finding an edition that is illustrated with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, for a full rendering of the Victorian sensibility of the time of publication. The perfect complement to the Fitzgerald translation.)