Rubaiyat of Omar FitzGerald
 A detailed discussion on FitzGerald’s
Rubaiyat will be held at Sri Press Council (near Horton Place, Mel
Medura) on October 28 at 3.30 pm. The discussion, hosted by Daya
Dissanayake, will be on till 5 pm. Professor Sunanda Mahendra, Dr
Praneeth Abhayasundara and other writers will take part in the
discussion.
Ghiyath al-Din Abu’l-Fath Umar ibn Nasaburi al-Khayami, a.k.a, ‘Omar
the Sage’.
The name sounds longer than a verse written by him, in the collection
that has come to us through the translation by Edward FitzGerald, with
the title ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’. One thousand years ago, the term
Rubaiyat was used by the Persians for a collection of ‘Rubai’, a Persian
verse form in a quatrain, with lines 1, 2, and 4 in rhyme. There had
been many poets who had written rubai.
“Poetry was perhaps the most important single cultural art form for
the Persians, and poets were honoured and revered” wrote Garry Gerrad,
in ‘A Book of Verse. The Biography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’.
Rubai were populist people’s poetry. Among Persians poetry was their
first love, and wine came second.
Like everything else in nature and culture Rubaiyat of Khayyam is the
result of many accidents or chance happenings.
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An
illustration in Rubaiyat |
Sir Gore Ousely became ambassador in the Persian court in 1810. His
collection of ancient Persian manuscripts were acquired by the Bodleian
Library at Oxford after his death. Edward FitzGerald had met Edward
Byles Cowell at a literary gathering in 1846. FitzGerald learned Persian
from Cowell. Then Cowell “discovered” an old Persian manuscript in the
Bodleian Library. He gave it to FitzGerald who “amused himself” by
translating the Persian verses into English. But the book did not sell.
They were put outside the shop by the publisher to get rid of them at
bargain prices. Dante Gabrielle Rossetti happened to pass along this
street, discovered the verses and immediately got a liking to them.
Cowell also “found” another manuscript in 1857 in the library of the
Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, which contained 516 quatrains. Cowell
sent a transcript to Fitz, and since then the manuscript has
“disappeared” from the Calcutta library.
That is how Khayyam and FitzGerald moved out of obscurity into the
limelight, to become one of the most talked about, and written about
author and translator among poets.
Several novels have been written based on the life of Khayyam, ‘Omar
the Tent Master’ (Nathaniel Dole 1899), Omar Khayyam (Harold Lamb 1936)
and more recently, ‘Samarkand’ (Amin Maalouf 1992). These novels add
more confusion to the life of Khayyam, because these books depict more
the fertile imagination of the authors.
Most of Khayyam’s writings were on astronomy, mathematics and
physics, among them a treatise on algebra and physics, ascertaining the
value of jewellery set with precious stones and astronomical tables.
In contemporary Persia poets were prolific in their writings, (eg.
Shah Namet 120,000 lines) but Khayyam is attributed with only about 1000
lines. The book discovered by Ouseley in Persia, and rediscovered by
Cowell at the Bodleian library, had been written in 1460, about 400
years after Khayyam may have written them. The book had 158 rubai
ascribed to Khayyam, and the spine contains the legend, “Rubaiyat Hakim
Umr Khiyam’.
Edward FitzGerald was born as Edward Purcell, in 1809 to John Purcell
and Mary Frances FitzGerald. When his mother inherited a vast fortune of
her father, John Purcell adapted the name FitzGerald and Edward too
became Edward FitzGerald.
“Edward was benign, modest, scholarly, unconventional, eccentric in
manner and dress and regarded as a bohemian. He had no aspirations to
material wealth and led a plain life that had little need for
it.....Later in life he had used banknotes as bookmarks but it was not
ostentation..” (Gerrard).
Only his first translated work, ‘Dramas of Calderon’ had carried his
name. His eleven other works, including Rubaiyat had been published
anonymously. “Rubaiyat represents less than 2 percent of his published
works”. (Gerrard). He wrote original works like ‘Euphranor: A dialogue
on Youth’
Khayyam had been translated into Latin by Rev. Thomas Hyde
(1636-1703), by Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall into German in
1818, and Gore Ouseley had done the first English translation, published
posthumously in 1846.
FitzGerald had first translated Khayyam into Latin, Monkish Latin as
he called it, before his efforts in translating the verses into English.
In 1858 FitzGerald submitted his translation to John Parker, the
editor of the ‘Fraser’s Magazine’, but it never got published. The
following year FitzGerald on his own published 250 copies containing 75
verses, but anonymously. Even after the re-discovery of the FitzGerald
translation in 1861, and became well known, still no one was aware who
the author was. The lives of Khayyam and FitzGerald are so intertwined,
that today it is difficult to study Khayyam without studying FitzGerald
at the same time. And this study leads to speculation.
FitzGerald published five editions of the Rubaiyat, over a period of
twenty five years. There were 75 rubai in the first edition, 110 in the
2nd, but 101 in the 3rd and 4th editions. There were 8 new rubai in the
2nd edition, which have been again deleted from the 3rd and 4th. Three
rubai from the 1st edition had been deleted in the later editions.
FitzGerald had revised many of the verses for every edition, sometimes
changing the meaning completely. It has been said that “the beauties of
Omar are largely due to the genius of the translator”.
There are Persian scholars who claim that FitzGerald misrepresented
Omar, making him into an impious hedonist, while Omar was really a Sufi
mystic.
Did a Persian poet by the name of Omar Khayyam really exist, or could
Omar Khayyam be a creation of FitzGerald? Could he have collected the
rubai’s written by many Persian poets and attributed all of them to
Khayyam? Does it not remind us of all the stories attributed today to
Nazrudin or to our own Andare?
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