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We
love the idea that Edward FitzGerald took the art of translation
to its extreme--from the manuscripts of Omar Khayyam he created
his own version of The Rubaiyat more than six centuries
later, literally remolding Khayyam's verse into some strange
fantastical creature: a hybrid beautiful poem and one of the most
beloved in English. There is something original in the
melodiousness of his translation, in its turn of phrase, in its
oriental beauty, that nobody since has quite matched with a more
literal translation. A
rubaiyat is a series of rubaiyah--a quatrain or
verse of four lines. What FitzGerald did was to recreate a
patterned checkerboard that ranged from dawn to night, with the
metaphors of the rose, the nightingale, the tomb, and the ruby red
of wine--an arc in the day of a drinking life. He translated
from Persian to Latin and then to English and took liberties at
will--he reordered verses, added his own lines, dropped pieces.
" Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle," is
his famous comment on translation . . . and that it certainly
is. The
famous first translation with 75 verses was done in 1859 and other
variations with various refinements and changes followed. As
Borges says in his essay on FitzGerald: "From the lucky
conjunction of a Persian astronomer who ventures into poetry and
an English eccentric who explored Spanish and Oriental texts
without understanding them entirely emerges an extraordinary poet
who resembles neither of them." The Rubaiyat
remains to this day the best exhortation to have a drink! |
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