Rustum...

IX

“But come with old Khayyám and leave the Lot

Of Kaikobád and Kaikhosrú forgot:

Let Rustum lay about him as he will,

Or Hátim Tai cry Supper – heed them not.”*

 

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Americans, the Rubaiyat would probably not have been picked up by British publishers quite so enthusiastically after it had wandered out of copyright. Without America’s wholesale pirating of FitzGerald’s translation, its prominence in the public eye – already waning from its status as a nine-day’s wonder, provoked by the Pre-Raphaelites – would most likely have dwindled away to almost nothing. However, late-Victorian and Edwardian England was intrigued by the brashness of American ways and they kept their collective ears to the ground concerning whatever was causing a stir across the Pond.

Literature in Europe was becoming an embittered territory: Tennyson, so beloved by Victoria, stood as a symbol of the outmoded and unfashionable; Realist literature, serialised adventure and romance in weekly periodicals, the Victorian triple-decker, were hide-bound formats that no longer provoked the literati. In France, the Symbolists and the Decadents were coming to the fore and, in the form of Oscar Wilde, were making scandalous in-roads into England. The violent, anti-establishment hedonism of Rimbaud and Baudelaire were beyond the pale of many British readers; however, the dreamy exoticism of FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam – with its upbeat sentiment – allowed many readers to walk on the wild side without the risk of public censure, or the possibility of having to wallow in the dubious mires of the French enfants terribles.

So the Rubaiyat was not only ‘edgy’, in that its exotic settings evoked the dangerous excesses of the Symbolist and Decadent literature of the time, it was also fashionable with the American ‘cool kids’. But there was something else that the Americans did which would send the Rubaiyat into the upper stratosphere of popularity.

We’ve seen an example, in Edmund Dulac’s work, of how well text and image come together in the context of the Rubaiyat; it seems like a perfect marriage of style and substance and there’s no doubt, it is. However, amazing as it might sound to us, it wasn’t an obvious leap. It took an American publisher taking a gamble on a little-known American artist, to come up with the concept of illustrating the poem.

 

Elihu Vedder Jr. (1836-1923) was born in New York City, the son of a well-to-do dentist. He decided early on that life as an artist was what he wanted and his mother supported him in this regard; his father obviously had other ideas, and Elihu Jr. was cut off financially after swanning about Italy in his youth with various bohemian colleagues. It didn’t help that his brother became a respectable navy doctor and dealt diplomatically with Japan during that country’s emergence from Imperial solitude: the comparison was always going to work against him.

 

Vedder had close associations with the French Symbolists and with the British Pre-Raphaelites; his style of art pre-figured the Art Nouveau and clicked with the mysterious iconic images of the Decadents. In the 1880s the Houghton-Mifflin publishing house commissioned him to illustrate their (pirated) copy of the Rubaiyat, probably at his own insistence. Vedder produced 56 images to accompany FitzGerald’s translation and the book was released in a limited edition of only 100 copies in 1884. It was first offered for sale in Boston on November the 8^th of that year and sold out completely in just six days, prompting successive, less sumptuous, editions to follow. The collection of images has been hailed as “a masterwork of American art”, and two travelling exhibitions have recently been held – in 1998 and 2008 – by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to showcase them.

 

Vedder’s impoverished life changed forever after the publication and he moved to Italy, his spiritual home, and remained there, with only sporadic visits to the US, until his death in 1923. By then his impact had been felt: the concept of the illustrated poem, of the Gift Book and other similar publications, had really taken off and the Golden Age of Illustration had peaked and was on the wane. Without Vedder, we probably would not have the gorgeously illustrated versions of the Rubaiyat that proliferated in his wake; and certainly not the bejewelled and gilded versions that were to come next...

 

*“Rustum the ‘Hercules’ of Persia, and Zál his father...” (EFG)

Hátim Tai was a philanthropist, famous for his generosity. FitzGerald’s inclusion of figures from Persian history was part of his aim of preserving oriental forms for poetic effect. In some respects he thought it ‘better to be orientally obscure than Europeanly [sic.] clear.’

 

Edmund Dulac

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, rendered into English verse by Edward FitzGerald, with illustrations by Edmund Dulac, Hodder and Stoughton, nd. (c.1920)

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine and upper board titling and decorations on purple cloth, with decorated endpapers; 202pp. [half-title; 1 blank; i-viii, 1-189; 3 blank], 12 full-colour plates, tipped onto olive backing sheets and tipped in with captioned tissue guards, and a decorated title page. Spine extremities softened and spine panel sunned; some shelfwear to the hinges and some light insect damage to the boards; endpapers faded, light scattered foxing throughout (not affecting the plates); some spotting to the text block edges. Else, good.

1880 to 1930 was the era of the Gift Book. These were deluxe printings of treasured tales and other writings designed to be given out at Christmas time as presents. The effort that went into these productions was top-notch, with illustrators and designers going their hardest to come up with ever more lavish books. There were two reasons why these books came about:

First of all were improvements in technology. The ability to print colour plates took a long time to get going: in the 1700s, workshops of – mainly – women, would be given stacks of engraved plates to hand-colour. They would have an example before them at one end of the room and they would have to reproduce the areas of colour as they saw them. Interestingly, some colourists became expert in a particular colour and so would do all of the red bits, or only the blues. This meant that there were wide variations in execution in these plates; dud copies were rejected as, no doubt, were bodgy workwomen; but some, like Sarah Stone, rose out of the workshop to become illustrators in their own right.

Eventually printing processes moved to eliminate the need for hand-colouring. After an initial impression which left the black outlines upon the page, the same sheet of paper was impressed by a second plate which was inked so as to leave colour only on certain parts of the page. Another plate would leave a second colour; a third plate another colour, and so on. The problem with this early method (which, fundamentally, is how colour separation still works today) was something called “poor registration”, which occurred when the plates were not properly aligned and colour areas would imprint slightly askew: the printing equivalent of not colouring within the lines. To help combat this, illustrators were asked to draw images with thick lines which would help disguise the overlap in colours. Arthur Rackham came to prominence just before the registration issues were overcome and he cursed the thick line discipline which was forced upon him by the technology; by then, however, the style had become fundamental to his working method.

By the first decade of the Twentieth Century, registration issues were largely eliminated and delicacy of both line and colour could be reproduced relatively easily, allowing illustrators greater scope in the kinds of art that they could submit. Printers were now trying to discover ways in which text and images could be printed onto the same leaf, but for now, the ability to decorate a book with sumptuous art ignited schemes for selling seasonally-available, desirable books amongst the publishers. Hodder & Stoughton were the first to move into this new market and in 1907 they issued Tales from the Arabian Nights illustrated by Edmund Dulac.

The second reason for the appearance of the Gift Book was a change to the copyright laws in Great Britain. In 1842, the laws had been changed so the author of a particular book retained ownership for forty-two years, or the term of their life plus seven years (whichever came first); this was an extension of the previous duration outlined under the previous law. In 1911, the law was further changed, extending copyright for the duration of the author’s life plus fifty years. Thus, the period of the Gift Book coincided with a frantic scurrying by publishers to grab the rights of as many popular titles as they could and hurry them into print. The Water Babies became free from copyright in 1905; Alice in Wonderland became available in 1907; Treasure Island and Kidnapped were available in 1925 and 1928 respectively, so it’s easy to see why there was so much excitement in the publishing world. Most importantly for our present purposes however, was the fact that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (at least FitzGerald’s first translation of it) became available in 1902.

Edmund Dulac was born in Toulouse in France in 1882 and was destined to follow his father into a legal career. However, legal life bored him and he switched to a degree in art at the École des Beaux Arts where he won early recognition along with some prizes. He relocated to the Académie Julien in Paris in 1904, but soon left for London where he set himself up as an illustrator: his first venture was an illustrated copy of Jane Eyre issued by J.M. Dent.

Afterwards, Dulac began an association with London’s Leicester Gallery and Hodder & Stoughton: the gallery would commission paintings from him which Hodder’s would purchase and use in their books. This arrangement suited everyone very well indeed, and Dulac was set to become, along with Arthur Rackham, one of the most successful illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration. He became a British citizen in February 1912.

After the Great War, Gift Books began to wane in popularity and so Dulac turned his efforts to magazine illustration, theatre set and costume design, medal designs and decorating chocolate box tops; he even designed postage stamps and banknotes. He is especially noted for designing the currency for the Free French state during World War Two and for designing the commemorative stamps for the coronation of both George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. He was at work upon an illustrated copy of Milton’s Comus when he died of a heart attack in 1953.

The Rubaiyat which Dulac illustrated in 1909 is one of the best versions out there. The one depicted above is a later edition in a smaller format, but it is a testament to how much people liked it that it was issued several times, essentially unchanged. I do have a copy of the 1909 first edition but I thought I’d save that one until later. Somewhat harder to locate is Dulac’s Stories from the Arabian Nights (1907), and I’ve only been able to locate a German translation (admittedly though, it hasn’t been on my radar).

The very tricky thing about collecting Gift Books is that they generally find their way into the nursery, at one point or another, as kid’s books. Thus, finding a copy in good condition – without tears, and spills, and expressionistic crayon addenda – is very hard. Although, given that it’s Dulac we’re talking about here, the rewards for searching are very great indeed!

Books illustrated by Edmund Dulac:

Bronte, The Novels of the Bronte Sisters, J.M. Dent, 1905

Stawell, M.M., Fairies I Have Met, Lane, 1907

Stories from the Arabian Nights, Hodder, 1907

Dulac, E., Lyrics, Pathetic and Humourous from A to Z, Warne, 1908

Shakespeare, W., The Tempest, Hodder, 1908

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Hodder, 1909

Couch, A.T.Q., The Sleeping Beauty, Hodder, 1910

Ali Baba and Other Stories, Hodder, 1911

Andersen, H.C., Stories from Hans Andersen, Hodder, 1911

Poe, E.A., The Bells and Other Poems, Hodder, 1912

Princess Badoura, Hodder, 1913

Stawell, M.M., My Days with the Fairies, Hodder, 1913

Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories, Hodder, 1914

Dulac, E., Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book, Hodder, 1915

Mary, Queen of Roumania, The Dreamer of Dreams, Hodder, 1915

Dulac, E., Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book, Hodder, 1916

Hawthorne, N., Tanglewood Tales, Hodder, 1918

Rosenthal, L., The Kingdom of the Pearl, Nisbet, 1920

Yeats, W.B., Four Plays for Dancers, Macmillan, 1921

Beauclerk, H. de V., The Green Lacquer Pavilion, Collins, 1926

Yeats, W.B., A Vision, Laurie, 1926

Stevenson, R.L., Treasure Island, Benn, 1927

A Fairy Garland, Cassell, 1928

Williamson, H.R., Gods and Mortals in Love, Country Life, 1935

Cary, M., The Daughter of the Stars, Hatchard, 1939

A Thousand Blossoms...

VIII.

“And look – a thousand Blossoms with the Day

Woke – and a thousand scatter’d into Clay:

And this first Summer Month that brings the Rose

Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.”

There are collectors out there who disdain efforts of others to spoof their favourite work; I’m not one of them. For me the fact that there are gently mocking or imitative versions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam out there only serves to underscore how universally embraced and accepted it was. I’ve seen “The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten”, “The Bachelor’s Rubaiyat” and “The Rubaiyat of a Golfer” to name a few. Most of these are simply humorous takes on the original and are pretty funny in and of themselves.

The following is a short story written by H.H. Munro, who wrote under the (appropriate) pen-name “Saki”. Taken from his collection of short pieces following his incorrigible social butterfly Reginald, this tale explores the vicious fop’s foray into the penning of poems.

 

Reginald’s Rubaiyat

'The other day (confided Reginald), when I was killing time in the bathroom and making bad resolutions for the New Year, it occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand, is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score, and then I got to work on a Hymn to the New Year, which struck me as having possibilities. It suggested extremely unusual things to absolutely unlikely people, which I believe is the art of first-class catering in any department. Quite the best verse in it went something like this –

“Have you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse,

Or the snarl of a snaffled snail

(Husband or mother, like me, or spouse),

Have you lain a-creep in the darkened house

Where the wounded wombats wail?”

It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that’s where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. It simply wasn’t nice. But the editors were unanimous in leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was extremely limited.

It was just on top of that discouragement that the Duchess wanted me to write something in her album – something Persian, you know, and just a little bit decadent – and I thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the requirements of the case. So I started in with –

“Cackle, cackle, little hen,

How I wonder if and when

Once you laid the egg that I

Met, alas! too late. Amen.”

The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an air of forgiveness and chose jugée to the whole thing; also she said it wasn’t Persian enough, as though I were trying to sell her a kitten whose mother had married for love rather than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and the new version read –

“The hen that laid thee moons ago, who knows

In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose;

To some election turn thy waning span

And rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes.”

I thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to satisfy a jackal, and to me there was something infinitely pathetic and appealing in the idea of the egg having a sort of St. Luke’s summer of commercial usefulness. But the Duchess begged me to leave out any political allusions; she’s the president of a Women’s Something or other, and she said it might be taken as an endorsement of deplorable methods. I never can remember which Party Irene discourages with her support, but I shan’t forget an occasion when I was staying at her place and she gave me a pamphlet to leave at the house of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and things for a woman who was suffering from a chill on the top of a patent medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the grapes to the former and the political literature to the sick woman, and the Duchess was quite absurdly annoyed about it afterwards. It seems the leaflet was addressed “To those about to wobble” – I wasn’t responsible for the silly title of the thing – and the woman never recovered; anyway, the voter was completely won over by the grapes and jellies, and I think that should have balanced matters. The Duchess called it bribery, and said it might have compromised the candidate she was supporting; he was expected to subscribe to church funds and chapel funds, and football and cricket clubs and regattas, and bazaars and beanfests and bellringers, and poultry shows and ploughing matches, and reading-rooms and choir outings, and shooting trophies and testimonials, and anything of that sort; but bribery would not have been tolerated.

I fancy I have perhaps more talent for electioneering than for poetry, and I was really getting extended over this quatrain business. The egg began to be unmanageable, and the Duchess suggested something with a French literary ring about it. I hunted back in my mind for the most familiar French classic that I could take liberties with, and after a little exercise of memory I turned out the following –

“Hast thou the pen that once the gardener had?

I have it not; and know, these pears are bad.

Oh larger than the horses of the Prince

Are those the general drives in Kaikobad.”

Even that didn’t altogether satisfy Irene; I fancy the geography of it puzzled her. She probably thought Kaikobad was an unfashionable German spa, where you’d meet matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My temper was beginning to slip its moorings by that time; I look rather nice when I lose my temper. (I hoped you would say I lose it very often. I mustn’t monopolise the conversation.)

“Of course, if you want something really Persian and passionate, with red wine and bulbuls in it,” I went on to suggest; but she grabbed the book away from me.

“Not for worlds. Nothing with red wine or passion in it. Dear Agatha gave me the album, and she would be mortified to the quick” –

I said I didn’t quite believe Agatha had a quick, and we got quite heated in arguing the matter. Finally, the Duchess declared I shouldn’t write anything nasty in her book, and I said I wouldn’t write anything in her nasty book, so there wasn’t a very wide point of difference between us. For the rest of the afternoon I pretended to be sulking, but I was really working back to that quatrain, like a fox-terrier that’s buried a deferred lunch in a private flower-bed. When I got an opportunity I hunted up Agatha’s autograph, which had the front page all to itself, and, copying her prim handwriting as well as I could, I inserted above it the following Thibetan fragment:-

“With Thee, oh, my Beloved, to do a dâk

(a dâk I believe is a sort of uncomfortable post-journey)

On the pack-saddle of a grunting yak,

With never room for chilling chaperone,

‘Twere better than a Panhard in the Park.”

That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable. I very much doubt if she’d do it with her own husband in the privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I’ve remarked before, should always stimulate the imagination.

By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with you on the 14^th, I said I was dining with the Duchess. Well, I’m not. I’m dining with you.'

 

H.H. Munro wrote a slew of stories, most of which, like this piece, are needle-sharp critiques of the society in which he lived, penned in vitriol. Reginald, and Munro’s other fashionable wastrel Clovis, waft through their upper class society leaving trails of mischievous destruction in their wakes. Like FitzGerald/Omar’s cup-bearer, Saki, after whom he chose his nom-de-plume, Munro offers a cup brimful of wonderful entertainment, guaranteed to make the reader laugh out loud.

Sadly, Munro chose to defend his country in the Great War and, eschewing a comfortable commission which would have placed him out of harm’s way, fought side-by-side with the enlisted men in the thick of battle. It was a tragic case of a thousand blossoms waking with the day, and a thousand scatter’d into Clay.

 

“Saki”

Hector Hugh Munro

18/12/1870 – 13/11/1916

R.I.P.

The Fire of Spring...

VII.

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly – and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”*

 

This verse is one of the more memorable ones and deftly encapsulates one of the running themes of the whole collection: namely that our time here on Earth is finite and that it should not be wasted. We are still in the Spring section of FitzGerald’s arrangement here and like many of these verses, the tone is imperative and urgent, calling us to hurry up or miss out. Here also is the notion of not wasting time on regret: guilt should not weigh us down or prevent us from moving forward; this new re-awakening allows us to cast off our old cares and make a new start.

 

 

FitzGerald’s later re-workings of this verse resulted in only minor alterations: “The Winter Garment” became “Your Winter Garment” and the final line was changed to “To flutter – and the Bird is on the Wing”. These changes arguably made the tone less pompous and melodramatic (“Lo!”) and the use of the pronoun makes the impact of the verse more immediate and personal; but the meaning is not altered in any fundamental sense. Personally, I prefer “fly” to “flutter” – because it makes that Bird of Time seem more dramatic and capable – but, each to their own.

 

This is probably a good time to discuss the other translations which FitzGerald undertook and the differences that appear as a result. My sense is that, whichever version of the Rubaiyat you encounter first, that’s the version you stay with. I read the First Translation and that’s the one that feels the most natural to me. I find that some of the later re-workings seem a bit tortured and less spontaneous; that’s not to say that I can’t see why FitzGerald made the alterations, it just boils down to a matter of personal preference. Take this for example:

“Wake! For the Sun beyond yon Eastern height

Has chased the Session of the Stars from Night;

And to the field of Heav’n ascending, strikes

The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.”

(From the Second Edition, 1868)

“Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight

The Stars before him from the Field of Night,

Drives Night along with them from Heav’n and strikes

The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

(From the Third, Fourth & Fifth Editions, 1872, 1879 & 1889)

Reading through the variations, you can see the progression of thought leading to the point where FitzGerald was finally happy with the sense of the verse. Just being able to do this – comparing variants towards a final polished state – is just one of the pleasures of reading the Rubaiyat.

Personally though, the first stabs, for me, seem the more spontaneous and instinctive. I wonder if FitzGerald felt driven by the criticism he attracted to polish, polish, polish. I hope not; I like to think that he fiddled around with it as a purely pleasurable exercise and I believe that he was epicurean enough for that to have been his sole motivation.

As we’ve seen, the Bird of Time is a living, breathing, growing sparrow; no paralysed eagle.

 

*The British writer and poet Robert Graves didn’t like this poem. Or rather, he particularly didn’t like Edward FitzGerald, and made a point of tearing him down and nit-picking his efforts at every opportunity. As we shall see later, he should have left well enough alone.

With this stanza, Graves pointed out that it derives ultimately from a poem called “Mantiq Taiyur”, penned by another Persian poet named Attar; FitzGerald had previously translated this verse under the title “The Bird Parliament”. Regardless of the source, the sentiment expressed here ties in with and supports Omar’s central theme; and since this is a free translation anyway, who really cares if FitzGerald took a little inspiration on the side?

 

High Piping Pehlevi...

VI.

“And David’s lips are lock’t; but in divine

High piping Pehleví, with ‘Wine! Wine! Wine!

Red Wine!’ – the Nightingale cries to the Rose

That yellow Cheek of hers to incarnadine.”*

 

The previous stanza is basically a list of things that time has done away with and which are lost forever, irrecoverable. This verse continues that summation; but then goes on to speak of things that remain constant and unchanging despite the ravaging of the passing years. ‘Wine’ remains fixed, and in this sense, Omar (and, by extension, FitzGerald) is talking about divine, intoxicating, Love, rather than vino, but the more prosaic reading is still there.

Taking a line from Háfiz, FitzGerald makes a distinction between the language of human beings which is flexible and mutable and alters according to circumstance and need, and compares it with the mystical language of birds, which – to his way of thinking – remains unchanged over the centuries. Thus, the words of King David are stilled and lost to us in a way that the Nightingale’s song is not.

Here we are also walking through a seasonal “spring” in the unfolding of the poem; the flowers are still just blooming and as Spring progresses, heralded by the Nightingale’s song, the flowers come into their colour, sloughing off the faded past of the previous Winter. Thus, it seems as if the song of the Nightingale brings a blush of red to the metaphoric cheek of the Rose.

 

It’s quite likely that Oscar Wilde drew upon this image when he wrote his children’s fairy tales. They are, by and large, a gloomy, cynical bunch of stories that are dubious fodder for young minds, but there is one wherein a Poet, longing for the love of a Beauty and wishing he had a perfect Rose to offer her, is aided by a Nightingale that thrusts itself upon a thorn whilst singing its swansong. The rose bush blooms into a single bud of perfection as the bird expires and the Poet takes it to the Beauty who snubs him and his gift. In disgust, he throws the flower into the gutter. End of story; lesson learned.

We are however, not looking at Wilde’s jaded world but rather Omar and FitzGerald’s gently musing one.

This is a tricky section of the poem, wherein FitzGerald is trying to fit Omar’s imagery into a shape that modern readers will understand. Omar’s goal for his verses was to try and make each an entity unto itself; FitzGerald breaks this mould a little by making verses run into each other every now and then in order to round out an idea. This is one instance where the previous stanza rolls over into the following one to continue a thought to its conclusion.

 

Professor Cowell was not a fan of FitzGerald’s efforts and felt that FitzGerald’s first duty was to the language and its resolution into English, rather than attempting to preserve the original writer’s concepts. Other commentators were even more critical: Cowell’s French counterpart and correspondent Professor J.B. Nicolas was incensed by FitzGerald’s work and, in 1867, published his own “superior” version in French. Nicolas went on to coach other English speakers to improve upon FitzGerald: best known of these is the English writer Jessie Cadell, who worked on her version whilst trying to recover from tuberculosis in Pisa. She too, was highly critical of FitzGerald’s work. Her translation was published posthumously in 1899 and faded into obscurity along with that of her mentor; another printing of her effort was released in 2005 amidst a general interest in trying to find other points of entry into Omar’s quatrains, but it has found only academic rather than a popular interest.

In response to all this negativity, FitzGerald was fairly indifferent. Responding to E.B. Cowell’s lengthy diatribe on linguistic adherence versus poetic intention, he simply said:

“Better a live Sparrow, than a stuffed Eagle”

thereby displaying his preference for something alive and dynamic over something lofty yet dead. And then he went on to publish other versions of the poem with the same rationale and enthusiastic popular reception, in 1868, 1872, 1879 and posthumously, in 1889.

The nay-sayers would seem to have been little more than one hit wonders.

 

*“Pehleví, the old Heroic Sanskrit of Persia. Háfiz also speaks of the Nightingale’s Pehleví which did not change with the People’s.” (EFG)