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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.

 

Edmund Dulac’s Book Graphics and the Problem of Orientalism in British Illustration of Edwardian Era and the Second Decade of XXth Century

Edmund Dulac’s Book Graphics and the Problem of Orientalism in British Illustration of Edwardian Era and the Second Decade of XXth Century. Dmitry Lebedev.
In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education. Atlantis Press, November 2019.

Summary

At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, Europe-wide enthusiasm about the Eastern art, which varied from Iranian miniature to Japanese engraving, led to the popularity of many artists whose works were impacted by Orientalism. In these circumstances, large London publishers, annually producing luxury gift books for Christmas, trying to adjust to the mass excitement around the Eastern art, invited young and promising graphic artists to illustrate these publications. Among the invited artists who actively cooperated with such publishers was the outstanding French-English illustrator Edmund Dulac (1882-1953). The article reveals one of the key aspects of Dulac’s oeuvre. The author considers artist’s attempts to convey the thematic and stylistic originality of the Oriental art in the context of book illustration of the Edwardian era and the second decade of XXth century. The work traces Edmund Dulac’s creative career and examines the cycles of his illustrations in order to identify both typical and original stylistic and compositional techniques used by the author to create works in the spirit of orientalist aesthetics. The article also deals with oriental works of Dulac’s contemporaries and analyses them in comparison with each other.

Study of Socratic Irony and Romantic Irony in Khayyam, Abol-ala and Schopenhauer’s Quatrains

Study of Socratic Irony and Romantic Irony in Khayyam, Abol-ala and Schopenhauer’s Quatrains. Ahmad Forouzanfar, Shahla Khalilollahi, Maryam Mousavi.
In: International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, Sept. 2019. Pp. 72-76.

Summary:
In this article we are determined to review Socratic irony, romantic and ironic structures of Khayyam’s quatrains and the ones attributed to him and explain the place of Khayyam as an ironist among other thinkers of the world, according to the meaning of romantic irony and Socratic irony in his quatrains.

How Khayyám Got Lost in Translation. Cultural Errors and the Translators of the Rubaiyat

How Khayyám Got Lost in Translation. Bentolhoda Nakhaeï.
In: Speaking like a Spanish Cow: Cultural Errors in Translation. Clíona Ní Ríordáin, Stephanie Schwerter (eds.). Stuttgart : Ibidem Press, 2019. 368 p.
ISBN: 9783838272566.

Summary:
What is a cultural error? What causes it? What are the consequences of such an error? This volume enables the reader to identify cultural errors and to understand how they are produced. The meta-translational problem of the cultural error is explored in great detail in this book. The authors address the fundamental theoretical issues that underpin the term. The essays examine a variety of topics ranging from the deliberate political manipulation of cultural sources in Russia to the colonial translations at the heart of Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Adopting a resolutely transdisciplinary approach, the seventeen contributors to this volume come from a variety of academic backgrounds in music, art, literature, and linguistics. They provide an innovative reading of a key term in translation studies today.

Absurdity and Metaphysical Rebellion in the Philosophies of Albert Camus and Omar Khayyam

Absurdity and Metaphysical Rebellion in the Philosophies of Albert Camus and Omar Khayyam. Lynn Alsatie. Indianapolis : Butler University, 2019. Undergraduate Honors Thesis.

Summary

The first time Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyiat were brought to the Western world, it was through a translation from their original Persian to English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859. Over the next century, Khayyam’s verses saw extraordinary popular success among intellectuals both in England and beyond. This paper, however, explores what these verses meant to Persians in Omar Khayyam’s context, long before the quatrains reached the West. Although whether the meaning of his poetry is esoteric or hedonistic in nature is debated, his quatrains express an existential longing and grieving that can be compared to parallel feelings described by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. In this project, I explore the similarities in the notion of the absurd as defined by Albert Camus with the expressions of absurd experience in The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. Through this exploration of the absurdist experience across cultures and centuries, I propose Omar Khayyam’s Ruba’iyat as an example that the spirit of metaphysical rebellion can exist in a non-Western context, and that it existed nearly a millennium before Albert Camus developed it as an idea in the 20th century.

Tamám : trace, reinterpretation and the periphery of poetic translation

Tamám : trace, reinterpretation and the periphery of poetic translation. Simon P. Everett. Colchester, Essex University, 2019. Thesis (Ph.D).

Summary

This thesis consists of two parts: my main creative project, Tamám; four translations of the Chinese T’ang poet Yu Xuanji; and an accompanying critical commentary. Tamám is a present-day reimagining of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám consisting of one-hundred-and-one quatrains. It frames translation as a creative process informed by philosopher Jacques Derrida’s la trace (trace): that source texts and other sources defer their meaning to one another, simultaneously absent and present in the genesis of new writing. These sources tangentially influence and “mark” the content and meaning of a new text. The main translational elements of Tamám are the Persian source text of The Rubáiyát; Edward FitzGerald’s 19th century translation of The Rubáiyát; the case of the Somerton Man; the sociopolitical climate of 21st century south-east England; translation theory and deconstruction theory.

Poètes de l’ivresse et du vin

Poètes de l’ivresse et du vin : Omar Khayam, Li Po, Charles Baudelaire. Michel Antoni. Paris : L’Harmattan Editions Distribution, 2019. ISBN: 9782343175805. 80 p.

Summary

Témoins de leur époque, de leur civilisation et des systèmes de pensée de leur temps, Omar Khayam, Li Po et Charles Baudelaire sont parmi les plus célèbres des poètes qui, à travers le monde, ont chanté le vin. Par-delà les siècles et les cultures, le regard d’une étonnante proximité et d’une fascinante modernité qu’ils portent sur la vie est universel et intemporel. Omar Khayam, l’astronome perse pessimiste et lucide qui vécut vers l’an mille et qui ne croyait pas au Ciel, Li Po en Chine, le poète de cour du huitième siècle également moine taoïste empreint de nature et de spiritualité, Baudelaire enfin, en France au dix-neuvième siècle, le poète du spleen qui s’interroge en pleine révolution industrielle : trois visions puissantes et complémentaires où s’exprime une véritable réflexion commune sur l’homme face à sa destinée, face à la puissance de la nature et à l’écoulement inexorable du temps.