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Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám and the tradition of verse translation into English

Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám and the tradition of verse translation into English. D. Davis.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 1-14.

Davis places FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát within the tradition of English verse translation as it has existed since the time of Chaucer. He suggests that FitzGerald was doing something relatively unprecedented when he wrote his versions of Khayyám, and that, together with the uncertain status of the original poems within the canon of Persian poetry, this was a prime factor in his work’s extraordinary success.

The Rubaiyat of Edward FitzOmar – Edward FitzGerald, translator of Omar Khayyam’s ‘The Rubaiyat’

The Rubaiyat of Edward FitzOmar – Edward FitzGerald, translator of Omar Khayyam’s ‘The Rubaiyat’. G. Sloan.
American Atheist Magazine (2002) (Winter)

Long ago, in the Protestant hinterlands of northeast Texas, four young infidels consecrated their bibulous souls to Omar Khayyám, the eleventh-century Persian astronomer, mathematician, and poet. Each Saturday night in an old Studebaker, we made a pilgrimage to Hugo, Oklahoma, the nearest wet town, to procure libations of Ripple wine. As we meandered homeward on isolated back roads, we swilled the “old familiar juice.” Between swigs, we recited quatrains from The Rubáiyát, the bible for apostate tipplers. The mellifluous verse articulated our cosmic incertitude, alienation, and melancholy yearning. It also lent a romantic aura to inebriation.

Von der Übersetzung zur Intertextualität …

Von der Übersetzung zur Intertextualität – Die Dokumentation fremder und eigener Texte in einer historisch-kritischen Edition. H.T.M. van Vliet.
Editio : internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft 15 (2001), p. 67-85.

Van Vliet discusses the complex relationship between original and translation, using the translations by J.H. Leopold of Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát.

Fugitive articulation of an all-obliterated tongue …

Fugitive articulation of an all-obliterated tongue – Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and the politics of collecting. B.J. Black.
In: On exhibit. Victorians and their museums. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000, p. 48-66.

In a chapter on the Rubáiyát and “the politics of collecting,” Black argues that FitzGerald appropriated an oriental text in order to domesticate it.

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.

‘Let the Credit Go’: Coleridge, Edward FitzGerald, and Literary Custody

‘Let the Credit Go’: Coleridge, Edward FitzGerald, and Literary Custody. Erik Gray.
Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge (1999) (Autumn), p. 47-52.

Edward FitzGerald seems to have been thinking of Coleridge while translating the Rubáiyát. In a letter of May, 1857, about a year after he had been introduced to the poem, FitzGerald gives the first evidence that he has been translating it into verse. Only a single quatrain is translated, and that not into English, but into Latin; FitzGerald writes, “I could not help running into such bad Latin,” which, he says, “is to be read as Monkish Latin.”

FitzGerald’s recasting of the “Rubáiyát”

FitzGerald’s recasting of the “Rubáiyát”. Parichehr Kasra.
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 130 (1980) 3, pp. 458–489

Summary

It was in 1859 when FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát was published anonymously. The masterpiece was rescued by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Whitley Stokes; yet it is difficult to say who first discovered it in Bernard Quaritch’s penny box. The discovery of this literary triumph was the beginning of an enthusiastic search for the identification of its highly gifted translator. Several men appear in this search. Among them are Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, a Harvard professor of fine arts by the name of Charles Eliot Norton, and Edward Burne-Jones, one of the Victorian painters. The identification of the translator intrigued the highly challenging task of finding the original Persian rubā’īs of Omar Khayyám which had inspired the English poet to write these beautiful English quatrains. With Cowell’s assistance, Edward Heron-Allen pointed at certain rubāis as the roots of FitzGerald’s quatrains. Several decades later, in 1959, Arberry published The Romance of the Rubáiyát, in which he showed his additional work in the same direction. However, a careful study of FitzGerald’s poem reveals that both Heron-Allen and Arberry have oversimplified the make up of the sources. To trace those elements of FitzGerald’s translation which are drawn from his general readings of other Persian literary works is nearly impossible. But a close re-examination of his quatrains shows the complexity of the use he has made of the Ouseley and Calcutta manuscripts . It is to this end that the followingp ages are devoted.

The Persian Rubā’ī: Common Sense in Analysis

The Persian Rubā’ī: Common Sense in Analysis. Michael Craig Hillmann.
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 119 (1969) 1, p. 98–101.

Comment on an article by G. L. Windfuhr, entitled “Die Struktur eines Robai” (ZDMG 1968, pp. 75- 8)

Die Struktur eines Robai

Die Struktur eines Robai. Gernot L. Windfuhr.
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 118 (1969) 1, p. 75–78.

Die Begeisterung über die Robais von Omar Xayyam ist auch heute noch nicht erloschen. Es ist vor allem die durch Fitzgeralds Nach-dichtung betonte- und verzerrte -Melancholie, die die Aufmerksamkeit heutiger Iranisten auf die Klärung des Weltbildes dieses Dichters konzentriert. Im folgenden werde ich an einem frei gewählten Robai Omars aufzeigen, daß ein Robai nicht nur Inhalt hat sondern auch Form; daß beide sich bedingen, und daß sich der Inhalt gerade zu mechanisch und zwangsläufig aus der Formanalyse ergibt.