Americans...

Thomas B. Mosher, 1911, Portland Maine; printed by Smith & Sale, Portland, Maine, USA.

Octavo; hardcover, marbled boards half-bound in gilt-decorated calf, two raised bands on the spine, with gilt titles and decorations in compartments, and marbled endpapers; 164pp. [4 blank + i-xxxivpp. + 1-118pp. + 8 blank], top edge gilt, most pages opened, with chapter colophons, red titles and title decorations. Mild embrowning of the endpapers and page edges; top hinge worn but still strong; mild stains to the upper board; some pages roughly opened. Very good.

The story of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a strange and wonderful one, which takes in all sorts of aspects of the publishing industry and of book production. For a relatively slight book (purely in terms of its physical dimensions), it really made an impact.

Edward FitzGerald published his translation in 1859, using the services of Bernard Quaritch, a London printer and bookseller. The slim volume of poetry fared poorly in terms of sales, and eventually, Quaritch consigned it to a wheelbarrow out the front of his premises along with a bunch of other poor-starters, and flogged it off at tuppence a go. If friends of Dante Gabriel Rossetti hadn’t mooched along and found it, the entire remaining print run would have been returned to the bindery, pulped, and re-used to make paper for another job. In the book trade, this process of winnowing out the duds is called ‘remaindering’ and it happens a lot with text books, which is why the world is cluttered with books referred to as ‘academic remainders’.

Nowadays, remaindered books are easily spotted: first they’re cheap, sold at a price much less than the one printed on their covers or wrappers; secondly, they usually have a mark of some kind to indicate their status as cut-price books. This ranges from a felt-tip pen mark on the text block edge, to a hole punched through the cardboard cover. A lot of secondhand booksellers take pains to obscure these marks as a means of justifying a higher price – this is an illegal practise, but, as is true of so many similar things, it is not generally enforced.

The Pre-Raphaelites glommed onto FitzGerald’s translation with a vengeance and saved it from obscurity. Or at least, they convinced Bernard Quaritch that perhaps the remaining copies should be rescued from that wheelbarrow and put back on the shelves. Rossetti’s crowd tossed the poem back and forth between themselves for a bit and some correspondence with FitzGerald was entered into (which convinced him to have another crack at the translation). Between them all, they created a ‘nine-day’s wonder’ in London, raising Omar’s profile a little in the reading community but not creating the sensation that was to come. The bomb was about to go off; but it was going to explode on the other side of the Atlantic.

The American settlers have always had an ‘us and them’ mentality; the first waves of white settlers seemed hell-bent on putting as much distance between themselves and Mother England as possible. Ironically, it seems that they’ve been trying to get back ever since. Often this is expressed as an ‘anything you can do, we can do better’ mania, which, in seeking comparison, comes across as a yearning for acceptance. American millionaires buying European, especially English, structures and shipping them wholesale to the US; the American fascination for royalty and for anything Medieval – it all speaks to a craving for a lost heritage.

In the publishing world, things were a little more clear cut. Like the Spanish and the Portuguese, dividing the globe between them in days of yore, the American publishers drew a line in the sand of literacy: Britain was Britain; America was America; what got published in one zone bore no claim to anyone or anything published in the other. This was all very well, except for one thing: whatever caused a sensation in London got smuggled out of England and was swiftly pirated by the American presses.

American editions were easily spotted: English paper at the end of the Nineteenth Century was made of pulped paper (from remaindered books, for example) and rags. This meant that it was more substantial, wore better, was resistant to the types of damage to which books are heir and stayed whiter for a much longer time. Rag-and-bone men patrolled the cities of England, collecting worn-out clothing and old newspapers to sell to the printers, just so this high-quality paper could be made. In America, on the other hand, paper was made largely of wood-pulp and other vegetable matter. This type of paper turns brittle in a very short time. As well, it goes brown very quickly and is hugely prone to foxing and other fungal and microbial blooms. American books were not made to last.

In terms of Omar’s work (and FitzGerald’s translation of it), spies in London caught the excitement of the Pre-Raphaelites’ discovery and soon, copies of the poem were shipped back to America. Whereas in London, the interest had been mild, in America the reading public was taken by storm. They loved the carpe diem tone of the poetry and it synched well with the frontier mentality that Americans had of themselves, of seizing the moment and making it their own. Soon any publisher worth the name brought out a version of the Rubaiyat, some of them very luxe editions, like this one.

Today’s copy is a Maine edition gifted to me by my sister, and incidentally the latest addition to my collection. In terms of production quality, it has all of the bells and whistles: leather, high-quality paper, gilt titles, marbling. It was produced by the publisher Thomas B. Mosher of Portland in 1911, and is their tenth limited edition, restricted to only 925 copies. By this time, notions of copyright wrangling had started across the Pond, and the sheer luxuriousness of this edition was probably either a thumbing of the nose to the Brits, or a last hurrah before payment came due. A constant feature of the Rubaiyat in publishing is its size: most publishers produced the work in small formats, either duodecimo or sextodecimo, because smaller meant more copies could be printed for the same amount of paper. This limited edition is set up for one of these small formats, but has not been cut down to size, leaving wide margins on each octavo page. Such a gratuitous waste of paper-trimmings, which would normally have been pulped and re-used, is a hallmark of the sumptuous in publishing.

(Incidentally, Mosher is also the name of my current publisher here in Australia, and the Mosher family, deriving originally from the South of England, have a long tradition of working with print that continues today. Hi Jenny!)*

Demand for copies of the Rubaiyat in America was huge and the poem was soon on a roll (even if FitzGerald earned nothing as a result). But this was early days: the interest would become incandescent with the arrival of a little-known artist named Elihu Vedder...

*Moshpit Publishing

www.moshpitpublishing.com.au

The Thoughtful Soul...

IV.

“Now the New Year reviving old Desires,

The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,

Where the WHITE HAND OF MOSES on the Bough

Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.”*

 

At this point in the poem, things start to get a little bit technical, with references to things that most Western, Christian, readers don’t understand. There are more of these later which are even more obscure, but this is the first one that has a ring of familiarity about it and which many westerners get frustrated by because the information seems like it should be discernible, but somehow it’s just out of reach.

The reference to Moses here is a bit obscure. To get to the heart of it, the reader needs to know their Bible, particularly this bit from the Old Testament:

Exodus IV:6 – “And the Lord said furthermore unto him, Put now thine hand into thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow.”

That is, his hand is turned chalky and white, as the flesh of lepers is often described. In the following section, God tells Moses to repeat the manoeuvre and this time his hand is restored to health. Moses is instructed to do this in order to demonstrate the power of the Lord (along with turning sticks into snakes and water into blood) to all and sundry. In particular, with this gambit, the implication is that God can take what is unhealthy and unproductive and turn it into something wholesome. So here, Omar (and FitzGerald) are likening the turning from Winter to Spring, to this magical restorative power of God.

In later stanzas, the references are less cross-cultural, confined to Islamic history and literature, but we’ll cross those bridges as we reach them.

There are other technical aspects of Omar’s work that we need to address before we continue and now seems a good enough time as any to sort them out. These are specifically, the limiting factors which made the writing of these verses so interesting to Omar and also to FitzGerald. First we need to pin down what the word “Rubaiyat” means:

 

The word derives ultimately from the Arabic word for the number “four” – “ruba”. You’ll have noticed that each verse consists of four lines; in Arabic the word for a four-line poem – what in English we would refer to as a “quatrain” – is “ruba’iyah”. Therefore, a collection of four-line verses is known in Arabic as a “rubaiyat”. Hence, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” or, to put it another way, ‘A Collection of Four-line Islamic Verses Written by the Poet, Omar Khayyam’.

As a further wrinkle, the rubaiyat follow a particular meter and rhyme scheme. Each line consists of a tetrametrical or pentametrical fomat; that is, there are four or five syllabic stresses in each line. This is pretty technical stuff and can get fairly abstruse, so I don’t want to get into it too much; suffice it to say though, that the words in each line of the poem follow a rhythmic flow; for Omar, this may well have been far more strictly adhered to than FitzGerald has done with his translation. In this sense, reading the verses in the original, they may well have sounded a bit stilted and forced – I would like to think otherwise, though.

Finally, there is a rhyme scheme at work, following an AABA format. This means that the first, second and fourth line all rhyme, while the third line ends on a different note. Without these versificatory limitations on the writing, the quatrain would not be a ruba’iyah. It would be like writing a limerick without five lines, without the jaunty rhythm, and without rhyming the first, second and last line together and the third and fourth lines together.

All of this is by way of underscoring the fact that, despite each verse’s small size and apparent simplicity, there’s quite a bit of thought that goes into each one. We know that Omar wrote and re-wrote his verses several times, rejecting and polishing them until they were right; in translating them, FitzGerald worked to make them accord with the Islamic verse scheme: throughout his life he worked to refine his translations across five separate published versions. That they seem to flow so effortlessly and speak to us so clearly (despite some clarification as discussed above) is a testament to why they’ve endured as long as they have.

 

*Omar refers obliquely here to his efforts in correcting a calendrical system postulated by the ancient ruler Jamshýd. FitzGerald massages the stanzas loosely into a morning-to-evening format as well as a Spring-to-Winter progression (although this is less well-maintained). The vernal equinox kicks off the Islamic year and thus we have here the New Year bringing forth new life from the plants – Jesus’ healing breath (a mainstay of Islamic doctrine) emerges from the ground to bring back the green growing things. With Winter over, inactive pastimes are put to one side in favour of action and effort – the “thoughtful Soul retires” as new life blooms.

Time Pressure...

III.

“And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted – ‘Open then the Door!

You know how little while we have to stay,

And, once departed, may return no more.”

By verse number three we hit the central concern of the poem: time is short; don’t waste any of it. We also catch the brimstone tinge of heresy that dogged Omar all his adult life: the idea that there isn’t any life after this one; that this is all there is.

This is a topic that is possibly overstated somewhat by FitzGerald in his translation and may not have been quite so evident in the original Persian; still, there’s no smoke without fire, and so Omar may well have been treading a fine line.

We know that Omar was drawn to Sufism, the mystical interpretation of Islam which has been allowed to flourish and has then been persecuted, off and on, over the years. A central notion of the Sufi worldview is that one’s personal relationship with the divine (i.e., God) should be akin to being ecstatically in love. Given this, being alive is a gift from Allah, as is the miracle of Creation, and so the proper conduct of the Faithful should be joyful wonder and gratitude for the fact of being alive in the world.

Sufi literature (apart from Omar’s writings) is full of references to “the Beloved”, and to roses and to being intoxicated (something disallowed by Islamic law). This is all code for this notion of ecstatic love and is not to be taken as literal. Even in Omar’s rubaiyat, the concept of another beloved individual, to whom Omar addresses his thoughts, should not be taken at face value: the Beloved, is Allah, the God of the poet. Except, of course, when it’s not.

Again, reading the translation by FitzGerald (or anyone else), we need not necessarily read a divine symbolism into the work; certainly Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites didn’t read it anything other than literally.

Along with all this “passionate romance”, there is the dubious notion of intoxication. Islam frowns upon alcohol so the notion of wine and of drinking rings strangely in a Moslem text. Of course, wine and its effects were not unknown to Islamic cultures and certain dynasties, whilst nominally true to the Faith, condoned drinking wine regardless. Obviously not the society in which Omar was writing.

In his verse, wine is again a code for various intangibles: it is the spirit which animates the mortal frame; it is agency through which knowledge of the Divine is revealed; and it is the presence of Allah which promotes ecstatic love of God. Intoxication therefore, is equated with the passionate relationship which the faithful have with the Divine. Sufi dervishes in Turkey dance themselves into trance states to achieve this altered state of consciousness, and many Islamic texts claim that insanity is a result of direct action upon the afflicted by God – literally the touch of the Divine.

Throughout the Rubaiyat, there are references to railing Sufis, and drunken scholars seeking after wisdom. There is a tension between FitzGerald’s take on this imagery (and he was learned enough to know the symbolic nature of his sources) and what Omar intended. For the reader, this layering of meaning makes the whole poem that much more fascinating.

Facsimile...

 

 

The Noel Douglas Replicas series; Noel Douglas, 38 Great Ormond Street, London, WC1; printed by Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd., Bradford and London, 1927

Square octavo; bound in mottled calf with gilt spine and board decorations, a gilt spine title on a crimson morocco label and marbled endpapers with gilt dentelles; 56pp. [10 Blank; (2) i-xiv ;1-21; (1) 8 Blank], on laid paper, top edge gilt. Water damage to the boards affecting the top corners near the spine and covering roughly a quarter of both boards (pages are unaffected); boards are slightly bowed; hinges are worn, with mild splitting to the head of the spine (still strong); previous owner’s bookplate on the front pastedown; previous owner’s ink inscription on the first blank page and again on the verso of the rear free endpaper; light scattered foxing throughout; text block edges mildly toned.

 

Bernard Quaritch produced the first edition of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1859 and it quickly made its way to the remainders bin in the front of his shop. After its rediscovery, its value shot up markedly: today, if I had a spare $80,000, I’d probably be able to afford a copy. Producing pirated versions (especially in America) was an option that increased circulation dramatically, but there were many licensed versions legally produced as well.

By the 1920s, the poem and its many printed versions were so popular that remembering the book’s first incarnation was almost impossible: getting back to those roots was probably the thinking behind the creation of this copy.

This is a facsimile reprint of the first edition. Technically speaking, a facsimile edition is re-print where the text material has been duplicated from an original source. As such, this was only possible from around the second decade of the Twentieth Century, when photographic and photolithographic processes first became available. If this copy had been re-printed from standing type, that is, from the original plates used and left intact from the first printing, then this would be a ‘second (or third, or whatever) state’ of the first edition, rather than a copy of the first edition.

Facsimiles are interesting in their own right, usually because they are produced in limited edition runs and this makes them rare. In the early days of their existences (and of course, in the rationalisation of their creation) the idea behind making them is to give interested parties access to works that would be otherwise out of reach, due to scarceness or price. They are produced as ‘reading copies’ but soon become collectible in their own right. In this country often-encountered facsimiles include the New South Wales and Hobart Town Gazettes – reproductions of the first newspapers produced by the colonial settlers of Australia – and Matthew Flinders’ Journal, complete with its folio atlas: none of these are cheap by any means, but they are more affordable and obtainable than the original printings.

Note that a facsimile, to be true to the form, must reproduce the format of the work as well as the words and images. The Flinders mentioned above, does this admirably, although it comes with a Perspex case that, inevitably, is cracked to some degree (not a great deal of forethought by the manufacturers there).

This reproduction of the Rubaiyat ticks all of the boxes: it presents the original text in all its particulars and also the format. That it is bound in a nice leather case is of no consequence – when the book first came out, buyers would have bought it unbound and had it cased to match their other books at home. So this arrangement is a likely one for any purchaser who made the decision to protect FitzGerald’s work.

I’m presenting this copy as the first one of my collection on this blog, because it is the one that I have that most closely matches the original version. That seems appropriate, I think. It’s by far not the most sumptuous or spectacular one that I own, but it seems to me to be an appropriate way to kick off this shindig.

Dreaming...

II.

"Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky

I heard a voice within the Tavern cry,

‘Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup

Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.’"*

 

 

Omar Khayyam was born in Naishapur in 1048 and died in 1131. He lived in Persia, nowadays Iran, and observed the Muslim faith. His family name ‘Khayyam’ means ‘maker of tents’ but it is unlikely that Omar came from such humble beginnings; like people today with the name ‘Smith’, the name is most likely a holdover from times long ago.

Edward FitzGerald wrote a short biographical piece about Omar Khayyam as a preface for his translation; however much of the information it contains is fanciful – more idealised than true. He lays out a tale of three scholars agreeing upon their graduation to seek high positions and to share their good fortune with whichever of those members of the triumvirate whose fortunes had served them ill. In this story, one scholar joins the court of the Caliph and becomes a respected Vizier; another becomes a radical defender of Islam, becoming the Old Man of the Mountain of Crusader lore, the reclusive leader of the Hashishin, the infamous Assassins. The third scholar – Omar Khayyam – approaches the Vizier and reminds him of their promise: nervous as to what kind of favour he might ask of him, the Vizier agrees to keep his word. To his surprise, Omar asks only for a place in the Court to study, enough coin to keep himself in food, books and ink, and a quiet place to think. This is, of course, a pretty little tale without much substance.

What is known about Omar Khayyam is that he was something of a polymath, a master of many disciplines. He was a mathematician and an astronomer and a philosopher; he wrote poetry and discussed theology. His discourse attracted a large body of followers who became his dedicated students, and it is to them that we owe our knowledge of Omar and of his poem.

Omar toyed with notions of Sufism, the mystical expression of Islamic dogma. He felt that a connexion with God should be personal and direct: an ecstatic relationship. Unfortunately, given his elevated position as a court astronomer, he wasn’t able to openly follow these notions of worship; rather, he had to tread the orthodox line of the current political regime.

Omar wrote treatises on mathematics that still survive today. As part of a larger group of astronomer-mathematicians – a kind of Medieval ‘think-tank’ – he helped to throw off the Julio-Claudian calendar and replace it with a more accurate version that was only surpassed by the one which we use today. Sadly for him, his unorthodox views of religion leaked out and he was forced to move from city to city avoiding the hot water of the eternal Sunni/Shi’ite divide.

Omar had a habit of writing quatrains of verse during his classes, after setting the students an exercise to pore over. Often he threw these fragments away, after wrestling with the verse form; unknown to him, his faithful students would scavenge for these snippets and collect them into long scrolls of verses. These became smuggled documents, shared between like-minded devotees, and owning them could be a reason to face serious punishment. None of these collections was identical to another: some had dozens of verses; others had hundreds; some of these, almost assuredly, were not even written by Omar. One such collection made it as far away from Omar’s homeland as Kolkata in India, where it was purchased for the Bodleian Library in Oxford, recorded as the ‘Calcutta Manuscript’. This is the source of Edward FitzGerald’s translation.

How heretical was Omar? Well it’s a matter of degree and perspective. His views on religion were seen as racy by the Powers That Were and he definitely suffered for his faith. He wrote to an acquaintance Kwajah Nizami:

“My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon it”

This may seem innocuous enough but, in the hardline Shi’ite faith which prevailed at the time, only God has knowledge of the future and claiming access to such information spoke of, at worst, traffic with demonic forces or, at least, hubris. Either way, it was enough to set Omar on an exile’s path. Ironically (or not, depending), Omar Khayyam was buried in a grove of rose bushes.

Today he is commemorated as Iran’s greatest poet.

*****

*Dawn’s Left Hand refers to the time of day just before morning, traditionally the moment when a white thread and a black one can be visually differentiated. The Left Hand of Dawn is therefore a false dawn. FitzGerald noted the way in which Omar’s thoughts seem to follow the course of a single day: “He begins with Dawn, pretty sober and contemplative, then, as he thinks and drinks, grows savage, blasphemous, etc., and then sobers down into melancholy at nightfall.”

Awake!

I.

 

"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."*

For many years now, I have been collecting copies of Edward FitzGerald's translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. At this stage, I think it's time to let my collection do its own talking and have its own time in the sun. Hereafter I will show off the fruits of my labours along with some discussion of the various historical facts surrounding the poem, links to other works, some controversies and disasters that have dogged the work as well as some talk about the various illustrators and critics who have enjoyed wrestling with this hybrid beast.

Simply put, I have had many years of enjoyment from this activity; now it's time to share. I hope you enjoy what my collection has to reveal. 

*****

*In the Persian world, the throwing of a stone into a bowl or cup, was the signal for a hunt to begin. In his subsequent re-workings of this stanza, FitzGerald altered and removed this image and it was far less successful (in my humble opinion, at least!).