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Photopoetry and the Problem of Translation in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát

Photopoetry and the Problem of Translation in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Michael Nott.
Victorian Studies, 58 (2016), 4, pp. 661-695.

In the early twentieth century, two photographers produced illustrated editions of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). This essay examines the photographs of Mabel Eardley-Wilmot and Adelaide Hanscom Leeson, and explores how the Rubáiyát, while not an Orientalist poem, prompted Orientalist responses in photography. Eardley-Wilmot and Hanscom Leeson’s photobooks are early examples of photopoetry, a neglected art form in which combinations of poems and photographs create illustrative, evocative, and symbiotic relationships between text and image. Given FitzGerald’s own interest in photographic culture and the poem’s concerns with literal and metaphorical truths, the Rubáiyát illuminates practices of understanding and translating other cultures in the Victorian period.

The Rubáiyát and its compass

The Rubáiyát and its compass. Annmarie Drury.
In: Translation as Transformation in Victorian. Annmarie Drury. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015. pp. 147-191.

Edward FitzGerald described his translation of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát, which he produced in four versions ranging from 75 to 101 stanzas, as centered on the theme of carpe diem. In musical terms, the poem might be described as variations on that theme; in visual terms, as a kaleidoscopic exploration of it. Following the lead of Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian poet and scientist, FitzGerald made his Rubáiyát elaborate a philosophy of “seizing the day”: through lamentation, through the recounting of personal experience, through bald assertions of defiance against conventional piety, through metaphorical representations of a world in which human beings lack meaningful volition, and through vignettes – especially the longest, most fanciful one, in which the poem’s speaker overhears a group of pots speculating about their creator.

Omar FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat. A panacea for Victorian era

Omar FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat. A panacea for Victorian era. Mahdi Baghfalaki; Zeinab Mahmoudibaha.
New Academia: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory, 4 (2015) 1, pp. 92–98.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, often called ―the single best-selling book of poetry ever to appear in English‖, was an outlet relief for Victorian era and a source of inspiration for the major Victorian poets as well. Why should this be so? Why should an obscure dilettante’s translation of the quatrains of a minor Persian poet have gone more or less straight to the reading public’s heart and stayed there for a hundred years or so? This paper is an attempt to analyze the reasons beyond the success of Edward Fitzgerald‘s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyamin Victorian era.

FitzGerald’s Approach to Translation

FitzGerald’s Approach to Translation. Habibollah Mashhady, Mahbube Noura.
International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research 3 (2012) 4, pp. 370–384.

The present paper attempts to explore FitzGerald’s overall approach to translation by examining his translated works and particularly by focusing on his translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. Khayyam Rubaiyat is selected as the text to gather data and it is compared to its English translation by FitzGerald in order to identify the strategies he used in translating it into English.

Victorian Poetry and Translation

Victorian Poetry and Translation. Richard Cronin
In: Reading Victorian Poetry. Richard Cronin. Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 114-140.

It was not a great age of poetic translation, but in D.G. Rossetti and Edward FitzGerald it had two great translators, and almost all the most important Victorian poets produced translations of one kind or another. Greek tragedy proved particularly attractive: Barrett Browning translated Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound not once but twice (1833 and 1850), and Augusta Webster translated it too, before going on to publish a version of Euripides’ Medea (1866 and 1868). Robert Browning accommodated within two of his later poems, Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) and Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), complete translations of two other plays by Euripides, Alcestis and Heracles . Edward FitzGerald translated the Agamemnon (1865) as well as Omar Khayyám.

The reception of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of ‘Umar Khayyám by the Victorians

The reception of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of ‘Umar Khayyám by the Victorians. Esmail Zare-Behtash.
In: The great ‘Umar Khayyám. Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2012. pp. 203–214.

Behtash gives an overview of Khayyám’s reception during the Victorian period in England, offering the reasons why the Rubáiyát became an archetypal Victorian poem, having a dramatic form, mysticism, Epicureanism, melancholy, loss of faith, anxiety about the future, and unfamiliar exoticism.

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.