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Robert Graves’s Mythopoetic Hospitality

Robert Graves’s Mythopoetic Hospitality. Sara Greaves
In: HAL Open Science, 2023

This article draws on poetry criticism, translation studies and, briefly, hospitality studies to revisit the controversial translation of The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah. Graves took an interest in Sufism, especially as a ‘force of mental power which could be created by telepathic communication’ and worked together with the Shah brothers to dislodge Fitzgerald’s nineteenth-century best-selling version and replace it with what was intended to be a founding text of twentieth-century Western Sufism, a ‘secondary original’. Nevertheless, the poet polymath had his own agenda, an act of mythopoetic hospitality that the controversy should not be allowed to overshadow.

Review of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

Review of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian based on the edition of Mahmud Yerbudaki with a historical epilogue by Juan Cole (London / New York: I.B. Tauris, 2020). A.A. Seyed-Gohrab
In: Bibliotheca Orientalis, Vol. LXXX, No. 1-2, p. 187-189

Omar Khayyám en de Rubaiyat in vertaling en romans

Omar Khayyám en de Rubaiyat in vertaling en romans. Kees Hendrikse
In: Boekenpost 10 (2002), 61, p. 34–35

In de serie onder de titel BOEKBOEKEN bespreekt Kees Hendrikse bekende en minder bekende schrijvers met hun boeken over mensen die boeken lezen, schrijven, drukken of verkopen: Garfield, Canetti, Bradbury, Hanff, e.a. Dit keer de apocriefe lotgevallen van een wereldberoemde tekst.

The Impact of Power and Ideology on Edward FitzGerald’s Translation of the Rubáiyát

The Impact of Power and Ideology on Edward FitzGerald’s Translation of the Rubáiyát. A Postcolonial Approach. Bentolhoda Nakhaei
In: TranscUlturAl, 11 (2019) 1, p. 35-48

Abstract

This paper analyzes the issues raised by the change of ideology and the underlying meanings in five FitzGerald’s translations of Khayyám’s quatrains according to the theories of certain translation scholars such as André Lefevere and Antoine Berman. With regard to the fact that the British translator has given a harmonizing beauty and an epicurean flavor of his own to Khayyám’s Rubáiyát, could it be claimed that translator’s voice is louder than the author’s? From the transcreation point of view, one could wonder whether FitzGerald did maintain the intent, style, tone, and content of the Persian quatrains. Do FitzGerald’s translations evoke the same emotions and does it carry the same implications in English as Khayyám’s Rubáiyát does in Persian. In general, from a postcolonial perspective, FitzGerald’s five English translations could offer interesting and fertile ground for investigating the effects of power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized text during the Victorian age in England.

 

Translation after the Persianate?

Translation after the Persianate? Omar Khayyam and Late Perso-Ottoman Poetic Connectivity. Mehtap Ozdemir
In: Philological Encounters (2023), p. 1-28

This article focuses on late Ottoman/Turkish translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (“quatrains”) as part of Perso-Ottoman poetic connectivity in the early twentieth century. Situating the reception of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat at the nexus of world literature, literary historiography, and translatability, the article explores the methodological affordances of translation to redress the overdominance of discursive and historical points of rupture in studies of late Persianate literatures. To that end, the article offers a comparative reading of Hüseyin Daniş’s Rubaiyat-ı Ömer Hayyam (1927), Rıza Tevfik’s Ömer Hayyam ve Rubaileri (1945), both of which are based on their co-authored translation in 1922, and Mevlevi Mustafa Rüşdi b. Mehmet Tevfik’s translation of Khayyam’s quatrains (1931–32). By way of specific attention to translation as hermeneutics, this article suggests that translating after the Persianate did not involve a straight shift from regional translation practices to translation proper nor was it exclusively a modus operandi of literary and linguistic nationalism. In drawing attention to how translation can accommodate both synchronic and diachronic mobility, the article therefore calls for alternative comparative methodologies which attend to persistent textual practices as well as conjunctural discourses in literary history.

A Case of Mistaken Identity in Translation: “Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat” in Dazai Osamu’s Novel No Longer Human

A Case of Mistaken Identity in Translation: “Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat” in Dazai Osamu’s Novel No Longer Human. George T. Sipos.
In: Sciendo. Romanian Journal of English Studies, 18 (2021) 1, p. 163-172.

Summary

This article explores the source and the meaning of the eleven quatrains quoted by modern Japanese writer Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) in his last complete novel, Ningen shikkaku (No Longer Human, 1948). Although dubbed as “rubaiyat”, which would indicate that they are translations of classical Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), the poems do not seem to match any of the known English translations from his work. This article explores the origin of the Japanese quatrains in Dazai’s novel, as well as their possible relevance for his literary work overall.

FitzOmar the fascinating “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”

FitzOmar the fascinating “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”. D. Rice
English review, 24 (2013) 1, pp. 16-19.

Edward FitzGerald’s imperfectly translated collection of 75 quatrains by the 12C Persian polymath Omar Khayyam has become a global phenomenon since its initial publication in 1859. The best known poetry book in the world, the “Rubaiyat” has been produced in at least 900 editions in 85 languages, while 130 artists have illustrated it and 150 composers have set it to music. This article suggests the many reasons for its success, such as the brevity and consequent digestibility of its four-line stanzas, the vivacity of the dramas they contain, and their sense of honesty, humour and reassurance. It also acknowledges the astute marketing and merchandising campaigns that helped to establish the collection’s assimilation into popular culture.