Liberties...

“It is an amusement to me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, & who really do want a little Art to shape them.”

-Edward FitzGerald

Throughout his tenure as the re-interpreter of Khayyam and his point of entry into the English-speaking world, FitzGerald came up against a wall of criticism and outrage. The constant refrain from his detractors is that of his lack of fidelity to the source material and his loose handling of the verses. It has to be said that there’s no real answer to these charges and – something that is generally overlooked in the discussion – FitzGerald never tried to defend himself against them. He did take liberties; he did play fast and loose; he never claimed to be doing otherwise. And yet there is this tidal surge of outrage against him.

The first to voice opposition was the man who actually invited FitzGerald to take a stab at Omar. Professor Edward Byles Cowell was FitzGerald’s tutor at university and taught him Medieval Spanish, before encouraging him to venture from the Mozarabi into the Arabic. Part of Cowell’s instruction was of a vested nature: the Calcutta Manuscript had languished untranslated in the Bodleian Library, considered an unimportant work, and, as far as scut-work was concerned, Cowell decided it was scut-work that FitzGerald could do. Whatever it was that he expected from his pupil, it certainly wasn’t what he got.

The Calcutta Manuscript had a chequered story, being purchased in Kolkata and then ignored by the British and yet of significance to the French, particularly a French academic named J.B. Nicolas, the one-time French consul at Resht in Teheran. Professor Nicolas had made copies of the work and had gone out into the world, recognising that other collections of the poetry existed, waiting to be found. He spent time gathering verses of the original, trying to pin down a definitive number. This proved to be a largely fruitless pastime:

According to the legend (and, like so many aspects of this story, it might not even be true), Omar wrote his ru’baiyah while in class, overseeing his students. As they toiled over the mathematical exercises he set them, he would work on his poems and, as often as not, crumple them up and toss them, as keep them. His students began to look for the rejected poems and collect them together. This had two effects: first, it exposed Khayyam’s heterodoxical thinking and got him into politically-hot water; second, it meant that the collation of his verses was arbitrary and piecemeal, no two copies of the collected poems the same, or indeed forming any kind of philosophical or thematic framework. The Calcutta Manuscript is simply one of these collected strings of poetry, albeit sumptuously put together. The idea is that there are as few as 70+ verses attributed to Omar Khayyam, or as many as 200+; there’s just no way to be sure.

Anyway, in retaliation to FitzGerald’s success with his release of the poem in English, Nicolas appointed himself the self-proclaimed ‘Keeper of the Rubaiyat’ and lobbied to have FitzGerald called-out as a fraud, even writing to Professor Cowell for support. To this end, he also encouraged other students (notably, Jessie Cadell) to turn their hands to the verses and come up with something better. No-one ever came close.

The clue here lies in FitzGerald’s statement, above. The original verses lacked that elusive quality which he calls “Art”. In re-combining the verses into a consistent framework that elevates and emphasises their message, and by highlighting a handful of the available symbols and metaphors, FitzGerald brings a level of clarity to the poetry that is clearly lacking in the original. In short, he turns a string of unrelated epigrams into a cohesive whole. You’d think his detractors could surely grant him that, but no – once they began their derision, it had to be all or nothing.

FitzGerald had access to a whole range of Persian poetry to which he could have turned his hand, and to which he often did. It’s clear that he felt there were ‘Poets’ among the “Persians” and that there were ‘poets’. In talking about Hafiz, he refers to him as the “most Persian” and talks of his verses as being too beautiful in the original to ever be translated – this is surely high praise. In terms of Omar, he often talks of his themes as being “the true metal”; his poetry? Not so much.

This allows me to take a little diversion into the world of Rabindranath Tagore. When he first came to the West, his poetry went through the hands of several editors and translators before appearing in print, in English. The main translator of his works was W.B. Yeats, a poet whose own work might be considered a good match to Tagore’s in terms of its mystical insight (although not that Golden Dawn rubbish) and lyricism. Tagore became the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature as a result and received a Knighthood (which he later rejected). There is however, as we have seen, translation and then there is translation: I have read Yeats’ version of “Gitanjali” and another version by another translator – the second is almost wincingly bad. Given the variation, it begs the question that the quality of the original must lie somewhere between the two extremes, or somehow, in some ineffable fashion, transcend both. Can the same be said of Khayyam?

Inevitably, given the heat generated by this debate (and we haven’t even gotten to Robert Graves yet!), a Peacemaker stepped into the ring. The arbiter in the discussion was the academic, Professor Edward Heron-Allen.

FitzGerald, Edward, & Edward Heron-Allen (Ella Hallward, illus.), Edward FitzGerald's “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” With Their Original Persian Sources Collated from His Own MSS., and Literally Translated, L.C. Page & Company, Boston MA, 1900.

Quarto; hardcover, in decorated cloth, with gilt spine and upper board titles and decorations; 164pp., in English and Arabic, top edges gilt, all opened with decorations, with a monochrome frontispiece and tissue guard. Mild wear; covers well-rubbed with some marks; corners and edges bumped; spine extremities softened; spine head pulled; discolouration to the upper board bottom corner; text block edges toned; very mild offset to the endpapers; previous owner's inscription to the flyleaf, erased; very light scattered foxing throughout, mainly to the preliminaries; top joint cracked; spine cracked. No dustwrapper. Very good.

His method of approach was a simple one: lay out the material – translated and not – in a single format wherein the quality of the translations could be compared and contrasted and the relative merits calculated by the reader. This wasn’t a new practise: translations of writers such as Plato and Aeschylus have been put through this mill since there have been university presses to publish them. However, in this instance, the objections and celebrations of the various factions surrounding the work could be put into perspective by the one party that really mattered – the Reader.

(It’s noteworthy to mention here that this copy of the work was published in England by Bernard Quaritch, the original publisher of FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat”, and licensed to L.C. Page of Boston to produce for the American market. Maybe all the controversy was bad for business?)

Anyway, this book – and many like it to come – attempted to pour soothing oil on very troubled waters and, perhaps, put the discussion into some kind of perspective for the population at large. How do you reconcile a piece of writing that, in the case of Graves, creates apoplexy on the one hand, and provides extreme comfort on the other – specifically referring to the fact that Thomas Hardy had the poem read to him on his death-bed? This production goes some of the way towards providing that resolution.