Persians...

One thing that we will continue to see as we explore the history and impact of FitzGerald’s poem, is a desire to reclaim the poem from its translator. As we have seen - and as we will see further – the poem is not so much a translation as it is an inspired adaptation. FitzGerald didn’t think much of Khayyam as a poet – he preferred Hafiz – but he did like the concepts that Omar touched upon in his scribblings. They suited his Romantic, Victorian sensibilities and so he took the verses and processed them through his own lens. However, there were many individuals out there who couldn’t see this distinction and who couldn’t see the point of playing with the verses if the result wasn’t to be a direct lifting of the poetry from the Persian to the English idiom. Some, like Graves, became infuriated; others were troubled and gnawed at the issue like a dog with a bone.

Amongst those troubled by the poem were many critics of Persian (later Iranian) extract, who saw in FitzGerald’s work an attempt at colonialization, or cultural appropriation. These charges are far more difficult to shrug off than the notion of sloppy translation work: Orientalism is, no doubt about it, a kind of cultural thievery, no matter how benign its intents. It is the slippery stereotypical slope to generalization and onwards to racism, casual or otherwise, and the critics who were concerned about this side of the poem had every reason to cavil.

We’ve seen how the Shah Brothers played this cultural appropriation card in order to get Robert Graves all fired up and to swindle him out of his cash and reputation, but there were other readers who were less venal and far more serious. Many of these sided with the French academics – still smarting about having not provided the first translation - and howled for “correct” interpretations to be created and to be given greater credence than FitzGerald’s. These were slow in coming and have really only started to appear in the latter end of the Twentieth and into the Twenty-First Centuries. None of them have come anywhere near to reaching the popularity of FitzGerald’s efforts and we might even conclude from this that, as far as poetry is concerned, Omar Khayyam was, as Edward pointed out way back when, a really good mathematician.

On the other hand, in the area of illustration, Persian and Iranian artists have done much to reclaim the poem as a Persian entity, by decorating it in the distinctive style of their country. Even Western artists – as we’ve seen with René Bull and Willy Pogany, for example – have mined the Persian and Middle Eastern art styles in order to inform their own illustrative renderings, even if these were a bit ham-fisted in places. Many examples of the poem, illustrated in the unique cultural sensibilities of Persia, have been produced and some of the best and most beautiful copies have been the result. Let’s take a look at some of them…

Edward FitzGerald (Foreword by B.W. Robinson, ed.), Rubâiyât of Omar Khayyâm, Persian Miniatures, Miller Graphics/Production Liber S.A., Fribourg/Genève Switzerland, 1979.

Quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and decorative endpapers; 124pp., with many full-colour illustrations. Dustwrapper.

A mainstay in Rubaiyat collecting, this volume is more a showcase of Persian miniature painting than a reproduction of the poem (although it is that too). In that sense it can be described as a rigorous overview of the art form, dressed up with some quaint Victorian English poetry. The work kicks off with FitzGerald’s biography - Omar Khayyam – The Astronomer-Poet of Persia - and a brief overview of the stylistic and historical terminology used in evaluating the art style by B.W. Robinson, in his somewhat terse Foreword. From there on, the work lets the art speak for itself and it is a gorgeous collection of Persian miniature art at its best. Many of the pictures used to illustrate the verses had never been published before this book came out and they all derive from the Reza Abbasi Museum in Teheran. The version of the poem used in this edition is that of the Second Translation, from 1868.

Edward FitzGerald (Sarkis Katchadourian, illus.), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald; with Paintings and Decorations by Sarkis Katchadourian, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, New York NY, 1946.

Quarto; hardcover, full cloth with bevel-edged boards, gilt spine titles and decorations on a white label and a blind-stamped upper board decoration; 138pp., top edges gilt, all pages decoratively bordered, with a colour frontispiece, ten plates likewise and many monochrome illustrations. Signed and numbered in ink by the artist to the limitations page (this is number 22 of only 1,000 copies). No dustwrapper.

Sarkis Katchadourian (1886-1946) was a world-famous Armenian artist renowned for his works done in the Persian style. After training in Rome, Paris and Munich, he travelled to India where he spent much of his time restoring ancient Mughal frescoes. He travelled to New York after the Second World War and created his illustrations for the Rubaiyat which were published by Grosset & Dunlap in the year of his death. The eleven images reproduced in this book perfectly compliment the poetry (the Fourth and First translation are seen here) along with the beautiful traditional decorations. The poem is accompanied by a biographical note on Katchadourian and FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam – The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, an ever-present starter for many editions.

Edward FitzGerald (Sarkis Katchadourian, illus.), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald; with Paintings and Decorations by Sarkis Katchadourian, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, New York NY, 1946.

Quarto; hardcover, quarter-bound in full cloth with a tipped-on upper board decoration, gilt spine titles and blind-stamped upper board titles; 138pp., top edges dyed plum, all pages decoratively bordered, with a colour frontispiece, ten plates likewise and many monochrome illustrations. No dustwrapper

The later and unsigned editions of this collection are just as pretty, with blind-stamped titles and decorations to the boards a notable feature

Edward FitzGerald (Introduction by Louis Untermeyer, ed.; Mahmoud Sayah, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; Translated into English Quatrains by Edward FitzGerald; A Complete reprint of the First Edition and the combined Third, Fourth and Fifth Editions, with an Appendix containing FitzGerald’s Prefaces and Notes, Random House Inc., New York NY, 1947.

Octavo; hardcover, full decorated cloth with gilt spine titles on a black label and decorative endpapers; 150pp., all pages with decorative borders and many colour illustrations. No dustwrapper.

Mahmoud Sayah, like Katchadourian, is an ex-pat exponent of the Persian Miniature style; however - unlike Katchadourian – he was actually born in Persia. And like many other Rubaiyat artists, he was trained to do anything other than art, but his natural inclinations led him from his destined path. Like Katchadourian’s offering, Sayah’s is a ‘whole package’ presentation with decorations littering every aspect of the work, from the cover cloth to the endpapers. Sayah’s images are more colourfully intense than the gloomier style of the previous book – some might even call them garish – but they definitely work well with the poetry. This edition covers the First Translation in full and then cherry-picks the Third, Fourth and Fifth re-workings, combining them into what was (presumably) Untermeyer’s preferred selection of verses. FitzGerald’s Notes and Biography of Khayyam round things off.

Edward FitzGerald (Abanindronath Tagore, illus.), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer Poet of Persia, Leopold B. Hill, London, nd. (c.1926).

Octavo; hardcover, full decorated cloth with gilt spine and upper board decorations; 64pp., top edges gilt, with a tipped-in colour frontispiece and six plates likewise. No dustwrapper.

Abanindronath Tagore was the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore and yet another stellar creative from that noted Bengali family. His career was highlighted by a need to rescue Indian art from the influences of outside colonializing forces and therefore it’s not so surprising to see him take on the Rubaiyat. The school he founded – the Indian Society of Oriental Art – was designed to counter British influences over modern Indian art. After his death, his son bequeathed all of his father’s works to an institution named the Rabindra Bharati Society Trust which has locked them away from view – it’s said that Abanindronath’s best works have never been seen by the public as a result. His illustrations in this volume are heavily Mughal in influence and quite austere, a nice fit with the presentation of the text with its 1920s typography. Sadly, most copies of this edition fall prey to heavy offsetting and embrowning around the plates. The text is the First Translation with FitzGerald’s Biography of Khayyam and Notes.

Edward FitzGerald (Muraqqa-i-Chughtai, illus.), The Illustrated Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Caxton Editions/Caxton Publishing Group, London, 2001.

Quarto; hardcover, illustrated boards with metallic-red upper board titles and borders and decorated endpapers; 109pp., all pages with decorative borders, with a colour frontispiece and many colour and monochrome illustrations. Dustwrapper.

Muraqqa i-Chughtai (here referred-to as “Muraqqa Chugtai”) was an Indo-Persian artist who worked at the beginning of the last century and whose Mughal stylings are heavily influenced by the Persian Miniature style as well as the Art Nouveau flavour of the time. The images used here were not created intentionally for the Rubaiyat, but rather were designed to accompany the poems of another Persian poet, Mirza Ghalib: I guess that the Caxton Editions editor who helmed this project felt that they would serve. It’s clear that some jiggery-pokery might have been going on as well, since many of the images have been reproduced horizontally-flipped and weirdly cropped, possibly to avoid copyright issues but more likely just to suit the personal aesthetics of those in charge. Chughtai was directly influenced by Abanindronath Tagore’s thinking and personal art style, which is abundantly clear from these images. The First Translation is the text in use here.

[Edward J. FitzGerald], Rubaiyyat of Hakim Omar Khayyam, Amir-Kabir, Tehran Iran, 1967.

Octavo; hardcover, with illustrated boards and decorated endpapers; 143pp., all decorated, text in Persian, English, German and French, with 28 colour and monochrome plates. No dustwrapper.

This Persian edition really fires on all cylinders. The artist is not identified in English translation, but their work is consistent throughout the book, sometimes adhering to strict Persian Miniature stylings and occasionally taking off on wild flights of fantasy as the inspirational text dictates. The script is FitzGerald’s First Translation and is usefully accompanied by translations into three other languages for comparison (and probably with an eye to widening the marketplace for this book). FitzGerald is not explicitly stated as the author of the piece, but his name does appear at the end of his essay, Omar Khayyam – The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, with the addition of his middle initial. Omar is also renamed as “Hakim” for reasons unstated (in English at least!). Such additions and elisions certainly feel like they stem from a desire to ‘reclaim’ the poetry for Iran as a Persian cultural artefact. The production-levels are cheap but luxe and make for a pleasing whole.

*****

Edward FitzGerald (Willy Pogany, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Fourth Rendering in English Verse, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., London, 1934.

Octavo; hardcover, full green leather, with gilt spine and upper board titles and decorations and decorative endpapers; unpaginated (pp.), top edges gilt and all pages with decorative borders, with a tipped-in colour frontispiece, seven plates likewise, and many monochrome illustrations. No dustwrapper

At the start of this overview, I stated that many Western illustrators who undertook to illuminate the Rubaiyat often took their inspiration from Persian (or other, Middle Eastern) artists. One of these was the noted Rubaiyat illustrator Willy Pogany. In my previous post on his contributions, I mentioned that I didn’t have a copy of the 1930 edition that he did for George G. Harrap & Co.; however, since then I have made up for that oversight. This is a reprint of that 1930 edition containing a subset of the original plates and the other decorations. This was standard practice with these gift book productions – release the full deal initially, then pare it back and release it – usually in a smaller format - for subsequent printings. This is the reduced 1934 production with only seven of the original twelve plates, but I’m getting closer.

The Hollywood influence is quite marked in this set of images, livening up the naiveté of his first attempt. In that sense, it’s more of an Orientalist artefact than his first outing, but nevertheless he’s still trying to be true to the stated roots of the work. The Persian influence is marked, and there is no indication of the radical shift about to take place between this set and the 1942, David Mackay, edition. In the initial printing, the First and Fourth Translation were presented; here, only the Fourth is present, without any of FitzGerald’s accompanying explanatory material.

*****

It can be seen from the above list that Persian contribution to the literary history of the Rubaiyat goes far beyond the original text as written by Omar Khayyam. There is a sense of reclamation in these works – whether that goal is warranted or not – but it doesn’t really descend to a wholesale grinding of axes and pushing of barrows, which would definitely colour the whole exercise badly. Rather, the contributions of these artists broadens, and deepens the texture of the Rubaiyat’s history, adding even more layers of nuance for collectors and appreciators!

Ophelias…

It’s almost inevitable really. People coming together over wine and poetry, maybe with a few candles and something toothsome to nibble. At some point, the intimacy becomes too distracting and, the next thing you know, the “Book of Verse” is going up in smoke. Obviously, if the intimate moment is taking place upon the “delightful Herb whose tender Green Fledges the River’s Lip”, then it’s a simple expedient to bung the Book into the River to quench the flames. Poetry saved; problem solved.

I have a couple of copies of the Rubaiyat which have had this happen to them – or rather, which I imagine have experienced this – moisture damaged and a little singed around the edges. I call them ‘Ophelias’ because, like the character from “Hamlet”, they too have been burned by love and then drowned.

FITZGERALD, Edward (Willy Pogany, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., n.p. (London), n.d. (c.1925).

Duodecimo; limp suede wrappers, with blind-stamped spine titles and upper board decoration, gilt upper board titles and a cream ribbon; unpaginated (96pp.), top edges gilt and all pages untrimmed with decorative borders, with a tipped-in colour frontispiece and three plates likewise.

Moderate wear: covers well-rubbed and edgeworn with charring to the front cover; spine head pulled; text block edges toned with some smoke damage; spine cracked; endpapers moisture damaged with some creasing; previous owners’ contemporary ink inscriptions to the half-title page; ribbon detached; some pages loose; tears to the fore-edges of a couple of the last pages. Fair.

This example bears all of the hallmarks. The front cover is completely singed, with the suede burned down to the leather along the bottom edge; the corners and spine head are chipped where the scorched sections have flaked off and the whole text block is starting to come apart. Basically, it’s a mess, with little or no re-sale value: it’s not even worth getting it repaired. Still, the story it tells of an eventful evening (possibly) is something I find endearing.

FITZGERALD, Edward (Gilbert James, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, R.F. Fenno & Company, New York NY, n.d. (c.1910).

Octavo; full red morocco, with gilt upper board titles and decoration and watered-silk bonded endpapers; 118pp., untrimmed, top edges gilt and all pages with decorative coloured borders, with a colour frontispiece (with tissue guard) and 11 plates likewise (no guards).

Moderate wear: boards rubbed and edgeworn with some fraying to the corners; spine extremities pulled and spine sunned; text block edges toned with some staining; spine cracked; moisture damage – rippling and staining to most pages; fore-edges of some pages lightly torn from being separated after being dried; some light scorchmarks to a few page fore-edges. Fair.

In this instance, it’s clear that this was a case of over-compensation. The amount of fire damage here is very slight, but obviously, someone panicked and dunked the book more than was absolutely necessary. I keep this copy around because it contains a selection of the Gilbert James illustrations which have been copied using a kind of photogravure process: this has made the otherwise light and ephemeral drawings rather harsh and flat with a kind of effect similar to the poster work of Alphonse Mucha. It’s also typical of the rampant piracy that the Americans were into back then, in terms of copying this work from across the Pond.

Again, the condition of this book means that it has no real monetary value; but for me, it serves as a demonstrative example of not only James’ collection of Rubaiyat images (which have rarely been published all together in the same edition), but also as a concrete indicator of the publishing story of this poem. And I simply can’t bring myself to throw her away!

Censorship...

FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam – Fitzgerald Translation, Gornall the Publisher, Sydney NSW, nd. (c.1946).

Duodecimo; paperback, staple-bound with decorated snakeskin-embossed paper wrappers in a yapp binding; 80pp., all decorated, with 4 monochrome plates.

Moderate wear; covers rubbed and edgeworn with some marks; some light spotting to the text block top edge; light spotting to the preliminaries; previous owner’s contemporary ink inscription to the first page, along with the retailer’s ink stamp; “Caboolture Historical Society” ink stamp to several points within the text block. Very good.

The history of publishing in Australia abounds with occasions of censorship, especially in the Twentieth Century. There are instances of well-known infamy of which most people are aware, and which seem - to the untrained eye – to be standalone occurrences rather than irruptions of an entrenched policy, locked firmly into place. The importation and dissemination of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, was squelched within these borders (no surprise there – it was suppressed in most parts of the world), but it caused extra tension here due to the fact that he also penned another book entitled Kangaroo, set amongst union organisers in Sydney: why then, it was asked, can we print this book and not that one? The arguments went back and forth… Ulysses by Joyce was also unremarkable in being targeted for suppression and spent time here in limbo, along with Lolita by Nabokov.

Some incidents became stellar news events. When Sir Eugene Goossens returned from Europe with a bunch of material in his luggage deemed to be “pornographic”, his sexual and mystical preoccupations were dragged screaming into the light of day by the Fourth Estate - he lost his job as the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and was hounded out of the country. His time in the spotlight highlighted the works of Sydney witch Rosaleen Norton (with whom Goossens had an intense association) which had also been withdrawn from sale, denied distribution rights and subsequently censored. Later, in the 1970s, the debacle surrounding the publication of “Oz” magazine emerged – a lampooning journal founded, ironically, in the spirit of that bastion of Australian periodicals “The Bulletin” – which led to court cases and headlines and (with the passage of time) guaranteed the future careers of those who produced it as leaders of the Australian art and publications scene. Time apparently does heal all wounds…

These few instances, while shaking the headlines, were the stressed expressions of a more far-flung and pervasive policy. In the post-World War Two era, Australia was wary of being financially bitten, as it had been by Mother England after the First World War – British demand for War reparations at that time crippled the country economically and drove it deep into the Depression. Decisions were made that were aimed at preventing money leaving the country, in order to prop up the local economy in the post-War boom. Comics, pulp fiction – both books and magazines – women’s journals on cooking and craft: it was deemed judicious to prevent such material coming into the country from overseas, with the idea that, if the punters wanted to buy this stuff badly enough, they would create homegrown versions of it, inside Australian borders. There were many ramifications from this decision.

Many standard genre fiction magazines, showcasing works by up-and-coming writers, suddenly developed “Australian editions” with local entrepreneurs buying the re-print rights for local manufacture. Companies like Gordon & Gotch, quickly snapped up Australasian rights for things such as Marvel and DC Comics, “Archie” and “Katy Keene” magazines, even Donald Duck comics, and produced cheap (often only black-and-white) versions from printing bases in Singapore. Local author “Carter Brown” – penner of over 300 pulp titles of exploitative gumshoe fiction - became so popular that his work began to be exported overseas, especially to the US. Anything brought into the country that was deemed a competitor to homegrown versions was quickly denied distribution. The sector most affected by these strictures was the "trashy" end of the literary scale - comics, pulp, ephemera - and so, for the most part, went unnoticed as MIA by the general populace.

However, there was an extra layer to this process as well. On top of considerations about the local economy, there was also a moral tone to these events, and it was these wranglings which invariably hit the headlines. Norman Lindsay spent his last years railing against “wowsers” in Australian artistic circles, referring to those people liable to be shocked by liberal attitudes in personal expression and who, contrarily, prudishly seek it out in order to quash it and deny others their own opinion. The censorship regime which took over Australian print media in the post-War era was laced with this wowser attitude and the times when it was seen to over-reach its ambit were usually the times when the public became pointedly aware of its purse-lipped moral crusaders.

With this particular version of the Rubaiyat, we can see the process in action. To kick off with, the format is quite a cheap one: many publishers looked at this poem as a cost-effective item in their stables. The poem was hugely popular; people would always be prone to shell out for a nice pocket copy of it, for themselves, or as a token of affection for some significant other. As well, it was literature, lauded at the highest levels of academia and considered one of the Western canon’s great works – who could object to its dissemination? Publishers could make small cheap copies of it in ongoing sizable print-runs and still recoup their overheads – we have to remember that there were strict restrictions on paper usage during the War, and for quite some time afterwards too. It was a solid cash cow essentially, and every publisher worth the name was doing it.

As we’ve seen already, the poem lends itself extremely well to illustration and decoration. It costs little more to add two-tone colour effects to the pages, or to insert plates at various points along the way; even to shell out for a fancy cover effect, such as the one utilised here. The only thing you really have to keep an eye on is your illustrator.

In this instance, the artist is simply referred to as “O’Brien”, either because they were well known in magazine circles (possibly a newsprint illustrator*), or because they wished to retain a sense of anonymity. Their illustrations for this edition are somewhat racy it has to be said (given the time period), and this might have caused the publisher some concern. As we’ve seen before, often an artist creates a whole suite of images for the work and these are published in a deluxe edition; subsequent, usually smaller, editions, edit out some of the plates as the size format dwindles. That might have happened here – I’m not sure. The plates that remain are somewhat orgiastic, in that they mainly depict drinking parties peopled with mostly naked individuals, and in the post-War censorship atmosphere, that might have been a headache for the publisher.

That’s not to say that the publisher might not have approved of the artwork or the illustrator; quite the contrary: they might even have been wishing to create a stir by bringing this version out on to the market, with its risqué doodlings. Equally, there might have been many tortuous discussions as to which plates could be included and which ones would have to go by the wayside: it’s just not clear. What is clear though, is that the publisher decided to whack the following trademark on the back cover:

This imprimatur – “Gornall Instructional Publications” – seems to me to be deliberately designed to take the curse off the whole venture. Gornall could easily claim that “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was literature and, as such, they had every right to get it out there to the masses – for “instructional” purposes. So, their artist got a little carried away with the theme – was it that bad? It could surely have been worse, like that stuff that Lindsay bloke comes up with, say. This is clearly a strategy, and many Australasian publishing houses were probably dancing this little two-step at the time.

I have a bunch of these kinds of editions of The Rubaiyat cheaply made in large quantities to serve the market demand, which was surprisingly high. Interestingly, the most ‘edgy’ of them (including many spoofs of the poem) seem to have originated from Queensland: this one, while published in Sydney, has a Brisbane retailer’s stamp on the first page, so maybe there was a concerted effort to flout censorship from up there? Who can say? Regardless, this one seems to have squeezed its way past the notice of the censorship board and to have made its way out into the light on its “instructional” rationale.

The days of the censorship of printed material for economic (and, just quietly, other purposes) has passed us by – it all came undone in the early 80s – but its impacts upon the Australian readership cannot be understated. Maybe it did become the spur for many local authors who - due to the presence within the local market of foreign versions of the stories they wanted to tell - might never have put pen to paper. Maybe, though, they would have started writing regardless. Magazines like “The Women’s Weekly” might never have grown as much as they did, in the face of imported journals like “Better Homes & Gardens” and “Town & Country”. If foreign journals, foreign thinking, foreign writing had been freely available here, we might never have experienced the 60s 'brain-drain' which saw many of our greatest minds - Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes - flee these intellectually-deprived shores for greener pastures. The whole issue goes to prove that our freedoms of printed expression are often not as free as we like to believe and that they’re certainly worth keeping an eye on.

*Actually, her name was Kathleen O'Brien, a well-known comic strip artist of the day...

Jazz...

“The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was a pervasive text throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras and continued to have influence over the War years and into the modern era. It continues to be quoted today and remains one of the most instantly-recognisable of English texts. We’ve seen that it has inspired illustrators, book designers and publishers, but its influence moves even beyond these. There are many occasions where lines from the “Rubaiyat” have been used as inspiration, or as touchstones to action or cogitation. Here is a musical instance.

Charlie “Bird” Parker lived a life that seems to have taken its cue from Khayyam’s Carpe Diem philosophy. He grew up in hardscrabble conditions and managed to soar above the limits of his origins to become the greatest jazz-player and innovator of all time. He is credited with defining the scope of modern jazz music and for the creation of the bebop style, along with “Dizzy” Gillespie and others. Unfortunately, Parker had serious mental problems stemming from substance abuse issues, involving heroin and painkillers, and his output was thus reduced to a short and intense 15-year period. After dying of an overdose in the New York apartment of his patron Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, the Rothschild heiress and jazz fan, doctors thought they were investigating the body of a man in his late 50s or early 60s; Parker was only 35.

As a black musician in less-than-tolerant times, Parker was exposed to all of the thoughtless cruelty inflicted upon performers of colour during his career, and it is no wonder that he chose to “seize the cup that clears Today of all regrets” in order to keep on going. He was often found to have sold his saxophone or his train tickets in order to pay for his next fix, and these instances were alternatively the making or breaking of him.

Ironically, just as Parker and Gillespie were formalizing the identity of the bebop sound, a two-year strike broke out to address inconsistencies in the payment of royalties received by musical performers. This led to a period where music was forbidden to be recorded for the purposes of re-playing by television or film companies, or for sale as vinyl discs. Some bodies were exempted – such as the authority that created vinyl discs for US troops stationed overseas (so-called “V-discs”) but, for the most part, the creation of bebop was not recorded at its birth and would have to wait until the ban had been lifted to begin its proliferation.

Another ironic instance concerns what was, perhaps, Parker’s greatest live performance. An ad hoc production ensemble somehow convinced Parker, “Dizzy” Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach to play the Massey Hall in Toronto on the 15^th of May in 1953. There were legal, personal and logistical problems galore in getting the five players there (Parker was contractually forbidden to attend – he performed as “Charlie Chan”) and, in the end, a championship boxing bout across the street between “Rocky” Marciano and “Jersey Joe” Walcott meant that the concert was so poorly attended that the producers were unable to pay the musicians for showing up. Nevertheless, it remains a defining moment in the history of jazz and perhaps Charlie Parker’s best live performance. Fortunately, Charles Mingus recorded the event, unbeknownst to many present, and, despite having to later dub in his own bass lines which were lost in the process, managed to capture an ephemeral moment in jazz music.

On top of all this, Parker showed up without his sax, having sold it to buy drugs en route, and he played a borrowed plastic instrument.

Like many performers of the time, Parker felt quite at home in France, where jazz and its performers – regardless of background – were well received. In 1949, he toured there and ended up on the Left Bank of the Seine, holding court for his admirers with the literati of the day. As Geoffrey Haydon has it in his book Quintet of the Year:

“The late-night jam sessions, in the cabarets on the Left Bank of the Seine, were blessed by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Pilgrims flocked across Europe to engage Parker in intellectual debate. Champagne was the all-day drink. Obtaining drugs was no problem. A critic from the ‘Melody Maker’, bible for Great Britain’s syncopated music fans, hastened from London bearing a questionnaire he had compiled on behalf of his readers. Parker, no doubt charmed by the English accent, rewarded each question with a quotation from the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’”

And there you have it: it seems that FitzGerald’s and Omar’s philosophies were a guiding influence upon the life of Charlie “Bird” Parker and the development of jazz music.

This “Bird of Time” had “but a little way to fly”, but he was on the wing…

Graves…

Graves, Robert, & Omar ali-Shah (trans.), The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – A new Translation with critical commentaries, Cassell & Company Ltd., London, 1968.

Octavo; hardcover, full cloth with gilt spine titles and decorative endpapers; 86pp. Mild wear; some softening and wear to the spine extremities; offset to the endpapers. Price-clipped dustwrapper mildly rubbed; some staining to the lower panel; now protected by non-adhesive plastic wrap.

The famous British writer, poet and translator Robert Graves had a contentious relationship with Edward FitzGerald and the Rubaiyat. All through his life, Graves derided FitzGerald for being homosexual; this from a man who professed undying affection for his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon during the Great War and then embarked upon a resolutely heterosexual existence after his overtures were rebuffed. From the outside, it smacked of a serious case of overcompensation in the face of rejection.

From textual and eye-witness evidence – along with the nature of FitzGerald’s unusual domestic situation – on balance, he was probably gay, or at least, somewhere on the non-hetero spectrum. Not that it matters. Unfortunately, for Graves it did matter. An awful lot.

Graves had a stellar career as a literary figure and his contributions can be measured by the fact that he was nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature. There is no question that his contributions are jewels in the crown of the English literary tradition. However, the vitriol that he spewed on FitzGerald was excessive and led him down a seedy and sorry path that all but ruined his career.

In 1967, Graves was approached by a Persian man named Omar Ali-Shah who claimed to have a copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat that had been in his family for 800 or so years. He proposed that both Graves and he – and his younger brother, Idries, a long-time protégé of Graves – could translate the quatrains into a ‘more faithful’ rendition, and thus ‘set the record of Omar Khayyam straight’. They began work upon the project, none more eagerly than Graves, and they produced a translation of the verses which was released in the same year. During the process, Shah travelled back and forth from Persia and, on one of these trips salted away the advance monies that had been provided by the publisher, after which he and his brother fell out of contact with Graves.

He had been conned. The book came out, but all the money which his lofty reputation had attracted had vanished in the production. The Shahs had chosen their dupe well – if Graves hadn’t been involved, the cash which had been ante’d up would have been much less; and Graves’s well-known distaste for FitzGerald had ensured that he would have talked the project up for anyone interested in listening to the possibility of ‘correcting’ FitzGerald’s efforts. If he’d been less egotistical and less well-known as a FitzGerald hater, the scheme might not have worked at all.

The Graves-Shah version of the Rubaiyat was met with acrimony. Graves was staunchly accused of trying to ruin FitzGerald’s work and of deliberately trying to destroy FitzGerald’s reputation. The academic world moved quickly to the conclusion that the Shah’s copy of the verses was actually a forgery. The book was a critical failure. Graves left England shortly after and spent the rest of his life hiding in Majorca.

A particular sore point for Graves was that he had long aided Idries Shah in getting his works on Sufism and Witchcraft (among other subjects) published in England. In the aftermath of the scandal, Graves repeatedly wrote to Idries asking him to come forward with the original family document from which they’d made their translation, in order to vindicate their work; however, Idries Shah claimed that it was no longer in his possession and that his father (the owner) was not prepared to come forward with it, due to the anger he felt at its translation’s poor reception by the academic community. In time, the fraudulent source material of the Graves-Shah effort was identified as having been culled from some preliminary notes penned by a Victorian student who’d attempted to organise an early translation of the work. Ironically, these were the same notes that FitzGerald had used when he had first embarked upon his own endeavours.

Graves lost out badly on the venture. The translation was spurned and the sales of the rest of his books went into a nose dive. It took years for him to recoup anything of his former reputation. He had created a “stuffed eagle” which had savaged him mercilessly, with little power left over to affect FitzGerald’s “live sparrow”.

Graves, Robert, & Omar ali-Shah (trans.), The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – A new Translation with critical commentaries, Penguin Books (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Ringwood Vic., 1972.

Octavo; paperback; 95pp. Moderate wear; covers rubbed and lightly edgeworn; mild creasing to the spine; text block and page edges toned; offset to the preliminaries; some early pages starting. Good.

But let us not depend merely upon the word of distant academics for judgement; let’s take a close look at the verses translated by Graves and Shah and compare them to FitzGerald’s versions. Here’s FitzGerald’s translation of the first stanza, from his first published version:

“Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.”

Here’s the Grave-Shah attempt:

“While Dawn, Day’s herald straddling the whole sky,

Offers the drowsy world a toast ‘To Wine’,

The Sun spills early gold on city roofs –

Day’s regal Host, replenishing his jug.”

What the…? And now here’s another famous verse:

“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.”

Which Graves transforms into:

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

A bare subsistence, half a loaf, not more –

Supplied us two alone in the free desert

What Sultan could we envy on his throne?”

A review of the translation from Time Magazine in 1968 accused Graves roundly of deliberately trying to strip the beauty out of FitzGerald’s verses and I think the charge is justified. The efforts all through the version are pedestrian in tone and lack any sort of poetic vibrancy. They read like literal transpositions from the Persian into English without any acknowledgement of the Art that FitzGerald alluded to when he set out to shape the poetry. Even the presentation of the book – severe in design without any ornamentation – reads like an attempt to transform the Poetic into the Spartan, to suck the joy right out of the verse. If nothing else, Graves and Shah revealed that perhaps the original verses just aren’t that poetically magical, and that FitzGerald’s was the secret ingredient that really made them sing.

The rest of the book is full of bitchy ‘criticism’ with screeds of venom-inflected details about what FitzGerald left out, what he added and where he was 'wrong'. For the most part these are completely subjective and entirely pernickety, stemming from Graves’s years of pent-up frustration and – I suspect – jealousy. There is an extended essay too, entitled “The Fitz-Omar Cult” which derides fans and supporters of the FitzGerald translation as wanting in their critical faculties – surely not the best way to endear one’s efforts to that same public?

Graves's eagerness to trash Edward FitzGerald led only to his own skewering by the literati, and the embarrassment of being seen to have been duped by con-men in the full glare of the public view. It’s a tawdry episode in the long and interesting history of the enduring Fitz-Omar collaboration which suffered in the imbroglio not at all.

The Cup that Clears…

XX.

“Ah! my beloved, fill the cup that clears

To-day of past regrets and future fears-

To-morrow? – why, to-morrow I may be

Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.”

With this verse, FitzGerald makes explicit his carpe diem theme. In a sense, this verse is a summation of several others that have gone before. In re-arranging Khayyam’s epigrammatic ru’bai, FitzGerald creates a definite framework for the sentiments. Thus we have some image-heavy verses one after the other and then we hit a fixed point – like this one – which makes explicit what the foregoing verses were driving at. There’s a lot packed into this particular quatrain, so let’s take it apart.

First, we have the Beloved. In the first translation, this figure is quite nebulous, but it firms up in the later versions. In one sense, the Beloved is simply an audience for the voice of the writer to address; in another, it becomes more personal and spiritual. Sufi belief identifies the ‘Beloved’ with God, the one who – out of love – created humanity and the world and for whom love in return is the highest form of worship. Sufism strives towards an ecstasy of love for the Divine into which one loses oneself as a form of mystical reuniting. As with many elements of FitzGerald’s translation, there are multiple readings at work here.

The later translations identify the Beloved explicitly as “Saki” – the cup bearer – kind of an Arabian Nights wine-waiter. The Saki ensures that the drinker’s cup is full and that the wine keeps flowing. Years of pop songs have taught us to recognise that ‘filling one’s cup’ is a metaphor for making one feel fulfilled and content; often the cup-filler is the one who is loved, or who is otherwise an object of affection. The Sufi mystics, notably the Whirling Dervishes, recognised the trance-like states that they entered through their dancing as being filled up with the ecstatic essence of God. We have a long poetic debt to Omar Khayyam and FitzGerald here.

It’s noteworthy here to point out that the Saki is never identified as either male or female. Some, like Robert Graves for instance, have chosen to use this as ‘evidence’ for the fact that FitzGerald was homosexual (something that has never been definitively determined). Given that, as we’ve seen, the Saki, the Beloved, might well be an image of God, the importance of gender for this figure is rendered completely beside the point. On the other hand – more prosaically – by rendering the Saki sexless, it allows the reader – regardless of their own persuasion – to bond seamlessly with the “I” of the authorial voice. In short, it allows everyone to read the work equally. The fact that most artists depicting the Rubaiyat choose to show the Saki as female, is another issue altogether…

The verse addresses the Beloved, telling them to fill their cup in order to remove regret caused by past actions and also the fearful anticipation of the unforeseen events to come. “The Cup that Clears” is a symbol of making peace with the past and releasing hesitation about the future; it’s a Persian-Medieval-by-way-of-the-Victorian-Era injunction to practise mindfulness; to live in the present. It’s quite possible that Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire were channelling just such sentiments when penning “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien” for Edith Piaf in 1960.

Now that we’ve cleared ourselves of regret for our past actions, that leaves What Comes Next. Here again the authors are explicit – nothing may change. Nothing untoward might take place. There is no point in worrying about what might happen, or what might not. Tomorrow, they say, you might simply be the same as you are today, with the same seven-thousand years of history behind you as before. (Both Khayyam and FitzGerald were raised with notions of the Earth only having been around for a few thousand years.) Amazingly, everything might stay exactly the same, as much as anything might change. There’s no point in fretting.

At this stage in the poem we’ve almost reached a point where the thesis changes over to a new tack. For those interested, there are six more “Seize the Day” verses to go before another subject enters the field; however, we should take the time to savour each of these as they pass and try not to worry about where we’re headed next.