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Balkan Rubaiyat. The post-Ottoman polysystem between East and West

Balkan Rubaiyat. The post-Ottoman polysystem between East and West. R. Mueller.
Paper, online available at Academia.edu, June 2014.

In the Balkans, two important national thinkers produced their own Rubaiyat translations. In 1920, Safvet-Beg Bašağić (1870-1934), Oriental scholar and father of Muslim nationalism in Bosnia, published the first translation of the acclaimed Rubaiyat in a South Slavic language. In 1926, Theofan Stylian Noli (1882-1965), ordained Orthodox priest, national intellectual and once-Prime Minister of Albania, published the first Albanian-language version of the Rubaiyat. What are we to make of the temporal and geographical convergence of these individuals and their text, their parallel projects of making a behemoth of modern world literature—itself situated in an unstable place between East and West—available to audiences in a newly post-Ottoman sphere?

Vernacularizing Rubaiyat: the politics of Madhushala in the context of the Indian nationalism

Vernacularizing Rubaiyat: the politics of Madhushala in the context of the Indian nationalism. A. Castaing.
In: The great ‘Umar Khayyám. Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2012. pp. 215–232.

Anne Castaing shows the influence of Khayyám on the young Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bacchan (1907-2003), who translated the quatrains into Hindi under the title of Umar khayyám kī Madhuśálá (“Omar Khayyám’s House of Wine”). Bacchan wrote his own collection of quatrains entitled Madhuśálá (“The house of wine,” 1935) that deals with the same motifs and symbolism and are interpreted as an “allegory of poetic creation, homeland, universe, love etc., with wine and intoxication symbolising the duality of existence, both sweet and bitter.” By using themes and motifs from Khayyám’s poetry, Bacchan readdresses the questions of orthodoxy versus free thinking, hierarchy of being and man’s place in the universe.

Traduire c’est trahir: des Arabian Nights aux Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Traduire c’est trahir: des Arabian Nights aux Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Laurent Bury.
In: L’orientalisme victorien dans les arts visuels et la littérature. Laurent Bury. Grenoble, ELLUG, 2011. ISBN: 978-2843101762

Il est une forme de colonisation plus pacifique, mais aussi moins univoque, puisqu’elle autorise une influence réciproque : l’assimilation d’une culture par une autre que suppose l’exercice de la traduction. Avec l’engouement qu’elle suscite pour les langues lointaines, la « Renaissance orientale » est à l’origine d’une floraison d’arrangements et d’adaptations, dans lesquels les Victoriens refusent de s’effacer humblement, préférant rester auteurs à part entière. Comme le montrera l’exemple de quelques traductions orientales produites au XIXe siècle, l’intervention de l’interprète y est souvent très visible.

Nation and Memory. Commemorations and the Construction of National Memory under Reza Shah

Nation and Memory. Commemorations and the Construction of National Memory under Reza Shah. Afshin Marashi.
In: Nationalizing Iran. Culture, power, and the state, 1870-1940. Afshin Marashi. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2011. ISBN 9780295800615

On a Fall morning in November 1934, several dozen european orientalists made a pilgrimage to pay their respects at the mausoleum of Omar Khayyam, the thirteenth-century Persian poet whose famous Rubaiyat had long been canonized as a masterpiece of Persian literature. The group of pilgrims included such luminaries in the study of Iranian art, literature, and culture as Henri Massé, Jan Rypka, Arthur Christensen, and Vladimir Minorsky. The gathering at Omar Khayyam’s grave was more than a casual homage, it was what the French historian Pierre Nora described as a lieu de mémoire, a symbolic event, site, or object designed to “inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial . . . all in order to capture the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs.”

Orientalism translated – Omar Khayyam through Persian, English and Hindi

Orientalism translated – Omar Khayyam through Persian, English and Hindi. Harish Trivedi.
In: Colonial transactions. English literature in India. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995., p. 29-52.

The Khayyam texts assembled in this essay constitute a partial but significant narrative of the formation of the modem Indian identity not only in terms of a Perso-Indian response to a Perso-Anglian poetic construct, but also in terms of the constantly shifting grounds of the linguistic basis of that response. The progress of Khayyam from Persian not initially into Hindi but into English into Hindi into English-English into Indian-English not only reflects closely the linguistic-cultural evolution of modem India from c. 1780 to 1989: it also provides a complex ‘oriëntalist’ sub-text of our colonial and post-colonial condition over this period.

Intersemiotic translations of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Iranian and Thai illustrators: a comparative study

Intersemiotic translations of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Iranian and Thai illustrators: a comparative study. Saber Atash Nazarloo, Hossein Navidinia.
Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 5 (2018) 1, p.p. 72-81.

Summary

One way of transferring the culture and identity of a nation is through book illustrations as a kind of intersemiotic translation. Omar Khayyam is an Iranian poet whose fame, thanks to FitzGerald, is now worldwide. Khayyam’s works have been translated to many languages and even some illustrators have tried to transform Khayyam’s quatrains into illustrations. Transferring textual materials into signs of non-verbal system is called intesemiotic translation. The aim of this paper is to analyze and compare samples of two successful illustrators, namely Muhammad Tajvidi, an Iranian illustrator who knows Persian, the language of Khayyam’s original works and Niroot Puttapipat, a Thai illustrator who does not know Persian, and therefore, the source of his illustrations is FitzGerald’s translations. Findings indicated that Puttapipat’s illustrations conveyed more cultural elements than Tajvidi’s, since the former is translated for a foreign audience.