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The Magic Lantern of Omar Khayyám

The Magic Lantern of Omar Khayyám. Stephen R. Wilk.
Optics & Photonics News (2012), 1, pp. 16-17

Optical projection techniques are mentioned in several translations of a quatrain from the poem “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.” What is the true meaning of Khayyám’s metaphor of reality as a shadow show?

Singing the quatrains. Omar Khayyám and Umm Kulthúm

Singing the quatrains. Omar Khayyám and Umm Kulthúm. Jan Just Witkam.
In: The great ‘Umar Khayyám. Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2012. pp. 85-95.

Witkam examines in this chapter the translations of the Egyptian poet Ahmad Muhammad Rámí (1892-1981) and how his translations were sung by the famous singers Umm Kulthum (c. 1904-1975) and Muhammad ‘Abd al-Vahháb (1907-1991)

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.

Whitley Stokes and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Whitley Stokes and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. J. Drew.
In: The tripartite life of Whitley Stokes (1830-1909). Ed. by Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-84682-278-0. pp. 111-118.

Drew describes Whitley Stokes’ role in the intriguing story behind the Madras 1862 edition.

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.”

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: ‘a Thing must live’

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: ‘a Thing must live’. Matthew Reynolds.
In: Reynolds (Ed.) 2011 – The poetry of translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Summary

In Pope, contrasting metaphors collaborated as guides to his translation; in Pound, an explicit metaphor of translation is, in practice, haunted by its opposite. FitzGerald associated various metaphors with his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: friendship with Omar, preservation of the ‘Oriental Idiom’ and: ‘at all Cost, a Thing must live.. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle’. This last is the most inward with his practice as it is nourished by reflections in the original Persian as to how life might continue into different creatures, or even somehow persist in inanimate matter. Yet such ‘life’ is radically ambiguous: the Rubáiyát is a questioning text in which the categories that usually discipline translation dissolve—as do my own categories of metaphorical explanation.