RESCUING OMAR KHAYYAM FROM THE VICTORIANS

The Rubaiyat or quatrains attributed to the mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. circa 1126) of Nishapur were made famous by the loose rendering of Edward Fitzgerald, first published in 1859.[1] Specialists in Persian literature now agonize over how many, if any, of these poems were actually written by Khayyam.[2] For a century after his death he was not renowned as a poet, even to those who knew him and wrote about him. Slightly later sources occasionally attribute one or two, or some as many as thirteen, Persian quatrains to the scientist. The oldest substantial book of them giving him as the author is a 1460 manuscript from Shiraz now held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (this was a principal source for Fitzgerald). Obviously it is very late, and eighty-two of the poems in it also appear in the divans or poetry collections of other authors. Thereafter collections of quatrains gathered under Khayyam’s name appear to have been popular in the medieval period, especially in India. They grew in size over time, becoming repositories for irreverence, free-thinking, libertinism, atheism, and sometimes existential despair. Khayyam seems over time to have been given the role of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights tales, of being the fictional frame author for popular and folk literature added to by many hands. Like the Thousand and One Nights, it is worthy of attention in its own right, regardless of authorship.

The Victorian style, with its archaicisms and euphemisms, has drawbacks for conveying the Rubaiyat. In contrast, the poems attributed to Khayyam are in a simple, direct, irreverent, and bawdy language. Many of the words used by Fitzgerald have a distancing effect appealing to the exotic or the ancient, whereas the original is marked by immediacy. Fitzgerald’s verses are often lovely and memorable and are justly celebrated. But each generation deserves new translations of the classics. What would happen if we put the Persian instead into contemporary idiomatic English? What if we removed the distancing language and spoke of being in a bar instead of “frequenting a tavern”?

The Persian quatrain or ruba`i consists of four half-lines and originally had an aaaa rhyme scheme (Persian, like Italian, is one of those languages in which it is perhaps too easy to rhyme). Later poets reduced the difficulties thus posed a bit by allowing an aaba pattern. If one is interested, as I am, in the meaning of the original, any translation with meter and rhyme is far too much of a straitjacket and forces the translator into compromises I would rather not make. Ironically, I hold that in English the sense of the quatrains is best conveyed if the knot of their formal shape is undone and they are put into free verse or conversational, unrhymed meters such as iambic pentameter.

The first poem here maintains that life is meaningless and ephemeral. The imagery, of carousing in the light of the moon, but then fast-forwarding to a time when the moon still shines but does not find the now-deceased revelers, is simple and powerful. Fitzgerald (i, 74) is good with the second two lines. But he neglects to mention the poet’s inconsolable broken heart or resort to wine to dull the pain.

Although Khayyam, a court astronomer at Saljuqid Isfahan and then Merv, was said to be paid ten thousand dinars a year, the poetry is often set among rogues and rascals in rundown establishments. The second poem here is typical in this regard. It probably inspired Fitzgerald (i, 2) to this: “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.’” The original evokes the gritty reality of what the Iranians called the “wine house” (maykhanih) or sometimes the “place of ruin” (kharabat), since the drinking establishments operated by Armenian Christians were sited on the edge of the city away from respectable folk. In this poem, men out for a late night have drunk themselves into a stupor. One of them abruptly awakes and insists that they finish off the open bottles before daybreak, which is made to symbolize death. Fitzgerald deflects the poem’s grittiness and the rough language the men use for one another (rind or lush, divanih or crazy). This poem is likely late.

The third poem given here is about social convention and the shame of drinking, a shame magnified in the case of the elderly, who in Muslim culture ought to have gotten beyond sowing wild oats and settled down to a life of prayer and righteousness in preparation for their imminent departure from this world. The quatrain depicts a younger drunk’s encounter with a brazen old lush, who dismisses such concerns about appearances on the grounds that God’s mercy is big enough to forgive mere wine-bibbing. Fitzgerald appears to have misread the Persian piri (old man) as pari (fairy or supernatural being) and so he made the verse about a divine approbation for drinking wine and missed the point of the original. It is not in the Bodleian manuscript and so probably is dated sixteenth century or later.

Although the fourth poem here comes early in the Bodleian Shiraz manuscript of 1460, on which Fitzgerald often depended, he did not translate it. It is unrelievedly gloomy. The poem depicts broken-down drunks in Iran’s frigid winter out at the wine house on the seedy outskirts of town, who huddle shivering since the stove is broken. They have pawned their heavy clothing to get money for wine. Fitzgerald’s are happy drunks, whereas the Rubaiyat sometimes give us mean, hopeless drunks.

The fifth poem is a polemic against astrology, and it is no doubt attributed to Khayyam because he was an astronomer. It warns against thinking that our fate or character is determined by the revolution of the heavens. Astronomers knew that the planets and stars have predictable courses and are helpless prisoners of the laws of physics, whereas human beings are highly unpredictable. Fitzgerald’s version (i, 52) is guilty of some Orientalism here, since he makes the humans and the stars equally impotent before fate: “And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky / Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die / Lift not thy hands to It for help—for it / Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.” The original Persian is more radical. The heavenly bodies are “a thousand times more helpless” than are people, implying that human beings do have a role in shaping their destinies. Perhaps the Western myth of the fatalistic Oriental was so powerful that it shaped Fitzgerald’s reading of the poem.

A common trope in the Rubaiyat is to remind the listener that the clay beneath our feet is made up of the dust of previous generations of human beings. Flowers that bloom from the earth are carrying the substance of the dead. Likewise, fired clay vessels such as drinking mugs in a sense embody past persons, who once had their own aspirations and passions. The Rubaiyat make this point concretely by imagining the handle of a wine mug having once been a lover’s arm draped around his sweetheart’s neck (number 6). Fitzgerald (i, 35) stuck with generalities, avoiding the specificity of this rather gruesome imagery. (With the emphasis on our living atop the dead and our being surrounded by the traces of their now-extinct passions, there is something Gothic about many of the originals).

Some of the Rubaiyat treat religious dissidence and unorthodox mysticism. As with the Quakers or Leo Tolstoy, they depict the divine as being within us. Number 7 here locates within the poet the chief Muslim symbols of divinity—the pen of the Almighty and the preexistent Tablet on which the word of God and the future of the world was written—as within the human soul. Fitzgerald (i, 71) gets the sentiment right: “Behold, Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”

Poem 8 appears to deny that there is any afterlife. The poet recommends that we take the cash of present pleasures in preference to the loan of those promised in the Muslim paradise. The final verse points out that a loud drumbeat is more pleasant to listen to from afar, perhaps making an analogy to the divine Mysterium tremendum, which it might be best to avoid nearing. Fitzgerald does not understand the line, taking the “rumbling of the distant drum” as a puritanical warning, which libertines will disregard.

The final poem, number 9, may actually echo a controversy from Omar Khayyam’s own life. He is accused by some later biographers of having dissented from a Leibnitz-like optimism that ours is the best of all possible worlds.[3] This quatrain points to the cruelty of the death that God imposes on the creatures he supposedly lovingly fashioned and wonders whether the same deity is capable of both fond creation and vicious destruction. I do not recall seeing anyone else suggest it, but it is possible that this poem contains a Zoroastrian, dualist critique of Islam’s monotheistic approach to theodicy or divine justice. Zoroastrianism attributed falsehood and death to Ahriman, the god of evil, and all things good to Ahura Mazda. This poem could be a sign of covert continued Zoroastrian dualism in Khurasan or Eastern Iran centuries after the Muslim conquest. Indeed, many of the themes in the Rubaiyat, including enjoyment of wine, could reflect courtly Zoroastrian values that became illicit in teetotalling Muslim culture. Fitzgerald (i, 62) gives this verse fairly literally: “Shall He that made the Vessel in pure Love/ And Fansy, in an after Rage destroy?”

Notes

1. Edward Fitzgerald, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam (New York: Dover, 1991, repr. of 1^st and 5^th editions).

2. Very skeptical is A. H. Morton, “Some `Umarian Quatrains from the Lifetime of `Umar Khayyām,” in Seyed A. A. Gohrab, ed., The Great Omar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Ruba’iyat (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 55–66; slightly less skeptical is Ali Dashti, In Search of Omar Khayyam, trans. L. P. Elwell-Sutton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971); admitting over one hundred Rubaiyat as the work of Khayyam is Mehdi Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005).

3. Aminrazavi, Wine of Wisdom, pp. 51–52.