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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.

Gilbert Lazard, translator of Omar Khayyam

Gilbert Lazard, translator of Omar Khayyam. Mohammad Ziar.
Faits de Langues 38 (2011), pp. 97-102.

Summary

Besides his Grammar of Contemporary Persian (1957) and French-Persian Dictionary (1990) Gilbert Lazard is also the translator of twelve books, including One Hundred and One Quatrains of Omar Khayyam (1994) where he tried to translate robaïat from the great Persian poet and philosopher, a translation more consistent with the taste of French readers and francophones. Obviously Gilbert Lazard has read but did not like many of the translations of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains done before him, finding them too solemn, which according to him, would not accord very well with robâï lightness and flexibility. So that’s why he decided that a new poetic translation would be better than those of Jean-Baptiste Nicolas: The quatrains of Omar Kheyyam, (1867), Charles Grolleau: The quatrains of Omar Kheyyam (1902), Claude Anet: Robais 144, (1920), Franz Toussaint (1924), Arthur Guy: The Robaï Kheyyam Omer (1935), P. Seghers: Omar Khayyam, his life and his quatrains, (1982), Mostafa Farzaneh and Jean Malapate: Cats of Omar Khayyam) (1993) … We, therefore, propose that some of these translations as well as One Hundred and one Quatrains be compared with the original text to see the strength of each and examine the quality of Gilbert Lazard’s translation.

Translating Metaphor and Simile from Persian to English: A Case Study of Khayyam‘s Quatrains

Translating Metaphor and Simile from Persian to English: A Case Study of Khayyam‘s Quatrains. Morteza Zohdi ; Ali Asghar Rostami Saeedi.
About Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 1 (2011) 9 (Sept.), pp. 1122-1138.

Summary

Metaphor and simile are two figures of speech which make comparison between two things. These two figures of speech are widely used by writers and poets in their literary works and Persian poets are no exception. Metaphor and simile often create problem for translators. These problems are even more complicated in poetry due to its compactness and its obligation to preserve the sound effects. This research intends to identify the most accurate translation made of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in translating its metaphors and similes. Khayyam is a well-known poet in the west and certainly the most famous one. This fame is due to the translation of his Rubaiyat by the Victorian poet Edward FitzGerald. But FitzGerald has not rendered an accurate translation and has done a more or less a free translation. In his translation, many of the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be confidently traced to any of Khayyam’s quatrains at all. Other translators also have translated Rubaiyat. This study investigates two translations of Rubaiyat (i.e. FitzGerald and Arberry) with regard to similes and metaphors.