Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát

Abstract

Among virtues of Christopher Decker's edition of FitzGerald Rubaiyat its patient elucidation, not only of various circumstances surrounding text's multiple versions, but of what we can infer about translator's equally various attitude toward his work. (1) Enthusiastic, torpid, apologetic, cavalier, across two decades and more between first edition of 1859 and final one of 1879 anonymous agent who once signed himself correspondence Fitz-Omar remains hard read with assurance--by reason partly of a diffidence that was specific man's character, partly of ambivalences that haunt translator's art generally. (2) But amid this history of shifts and much effacement, across variorum Rubaiyat there emerges an unswerving commitment that goes far toward explaining work's extraordinary appeal. I mean FitzGerald's commitment interpreting Omar Khayyam's quatrains not mystically but--in a term of FitzGerald's that becomes intriguingly complex--literally. The apparatus each version he authorized sets at defiance all Pretence at divine (1859, p. 6), all trafficking in Allegory and Abstraction (1868, p. 35), all Spiritual decoction of what is simply Juice of Grape (1872, p. 67). Keeping faith with his Persian original meant, for FitzGerald, scouting any and all Mysticism that might distract from Omar's manifest aim, which his Victorian translator deeply embraced too. That aim was to soothe Soul through Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them (1868, p. 31). No doubt, averred preface of 1868, many of these Quatrains seem unaccountable unless mystically interpreted; but more as unaccountable unless literally (p. 35). FitzGerald's literalist affirmation so often took a feisty form because it was embroiled from start a polemic against Omar Khayyam's allegorizers. They were a tribe who had been around a long time--medieval Christianity had nothing on medieval Islam when it came wresting heretic texts into hermeneutic line--and had voluble representatives still during nineteenth century, and even Europe. Well before 1859 FitzGerald was politely differing with his young tutor Persian studies, Edward Cowell, about how take some of Omar's bitter pills, and then 1868 he stepped into public ring square off against J. B. Nicolas, a French exponent whom poems were dark Sufi conceits disclosing an orthodox message after all. FitzGerald survived this challenge handily, but question that lay behind it has gone on survive him. It flared up again just a generation ago, when no less an antagonist than poet Robert Graves placed before public a defense and illustration of Omar's hidden and mystical meaning. The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam: A New Translation with Critical Commentaries a title whose every adjective bristles with polemic--and whose aggressively repossessive orthography prepares us learn that counterattacks were soon mounted polemical turn by harder-headed sons of Fitz. The latter have long since carried day against allegorically credulous Graves and his ignorant or unscrupulous informant, Sufi mystagogue votary Omar Ali-Shah. (3) I am spectacularly ill equipped pronounce on merits of this or any other matter pertaining astronomer algebrist with a nine-hundred-years-old name. But I can propose that his Victorian popularizer's firm commitment taking old Omar at his word--taking him literally, which say, part, linguistically--had, as its cardinal literary consequence, a mode of poetic presentation which Rubaiyat has owed breadth and longevity of its circulation among an anglophone public as the most popular verse translation into English ever made (Decker, p. xiv). For FitzGerald's freely translating hands this-worldly, bodily thematics of poem found consistent correlates its poetics. …