"Enow..."

XI.

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

And Wilderness is Paradise enow”

 

It might seem unusual for me to start one of these with a comic (especially a Garfield comic!) but it proves the point that this is probably the best known verse of the entire Rubaiyat. After all, if Jim Davis can throw it into a strip like this and be confident that the reader will know the quote, and register it as old-fashioned and corny, then its penetration into the social consciousness must certainly be pretty high. After all, no-one wants to footnote their newspaper cartoon strips.

The other clue to this verse’s defining popularity, is in the illustrations. If you look back on the recent discussions of Bull, Pogány and Dulac, you’ll see that, more often than not, the image chosen to promote their vision of the poem – as the dustwrapper image or frontispiece - is the one derived from this ruba’i. If you do a Google image search for Dulac, you’ll find a majority of the results are his “Loaf of Bread” plate.

 

FitzGerald fiddled with this verse a fair bit and apparently was never 100% convinced by it. Certainly that last word is a bit of a poser: reading it aloud always jars. On the one hand it looks like he’s forcing the rhyme by spelling “enough” in a way that makes it work with lines 1 and 2; on the other, it’s possible that he might be trying to say “even now”, but trying to force it into one syllable and to do away with the usual poetic contractions (which normally would make it “e’en now”). Either way it doesn’t really fly.

He modified it in the Second Edition, coming up with this:

 

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Second & Fifth edition

This alters the delivery of the last line, but doesn’t help at all with the rhyme, although the first two lines might be said to run a little more smoothly.

Ever since he first put pen to paper with regard to Omar, academic discussion has centred around whether FitzGerald’s translation is at all accurate and whether the sense he derived from the original manuscript is correct. Putting aside for the moment the embarrassing debacle that Robert Graves got himself into over this, the discussion has led to many attempts to re-visit the Calcutta Manuscript and start again from scratch. In 1979, Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs released their effort, published by Penguin, and their take on this verse is as follows:

 

“I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,

Half a loaf for a bite to eat,

Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,

Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.”

Peter Avery & John Heath-Stubbs

It has to be mentioned, that Avery and Heath-Stubbs were in no way attempting to derive anything other than the rawest, most basic sense out of the rubaiyat; they weren’t trying to win any poetry prizes. Other than trying to retain a four-line scheme, they dismissed the rest of the poetic format, concentrating only on converting the essential meaning of the words into English. The result is certainly not as pretty as FitzGerald’s, but it’s better than Graves’s effort, who considered himself a better poet – in fact a better person – than FitzGerald:

 

“A gourd of red wine and a sheaf of poems –

A bare subsistence, half a loaf, not more –

Supplied us two alone in the wide desert:

What Sultan could we envy on his throne?”

Robert Graves

Bleagh!

Graves also used this verse as “proof positive” that FitzGerald was homosexual. He declared that the ambiguous gender of the “Thou” referred-to, was a clear indicator that FitzGerald was playing coy about his preferences. Other commentators note, however, that the original rubaiyat variously refer to a mistress, a houri (one of the heavenly virgins that an Islamic afterlife is rumoured to be populated with), a saki (cup-bearer, or servant), or a youth: in terms of poetic economy, it simply makes sense to conflate all of these figures into one unspecific entity, and that’s exactly what FitzGerald has done. At least that’s my opinion.

Regardless of the actual words used to translate the verse, the images are pretty consistent. The notion of escaping into a wilderness environment, eating simply and forgetting the demands of position and duty are hallmarks of Persian literature, and common to most of Omar’s contemporary writers. The notion of Arcadian paradise – et in Arcadia ego – is something that Western writers have been advocating since the Ancient Greeks held sway. Personally, I think, despite which words are being used to express the sentiment, it’s one that we all instinctively understand: there’s no finer thing than a picnic in a pretty-ish little wilderness somewhere, with someone whose company we enjoy. As a bonus, we each get to decide for ourselves whose words we think express that notion the best.