’ART & SOUL
The wine of wisdom

Omar Khayyam was singularly gifted. Besides being a poet and philosopher, he was also a mathematician and an astronomer of marked abilities, writes B. N. Goswamy

I should have waited perhaps for being back in the Persian world of Hafiz and others again, but suddenly the other day, while re-arranging a disorderly stack of books at home, I chanced upon a friendly gift that I had received quite some time ago: a 1898 edition of Gilbert James’ Fourteen Drawings Illustrating Edward Fitzgerald’s Translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I had nearly forgotten that I had the book — had certainly lost track of it — but finding it brought me great joy, for it took me back to that charmed world which a ‘tent-maker’ had stitched together and sung about nearly a 1000 years ago. Some verses still swim in my head:

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

Or, again, in a complete change of mood:

"Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

And Wilderness is Paradise enow."

This is vintage Omar Khayyam — in some ways vintage Edward Fitzgerald, his best-known translator, who presented him to the western world in English — and there might be many who remember that enchanting poet through these words or others of their own preference. Delight keeps returning as one rolls these words over the tongue, and savours their subtleties.

The poet’s own words defy time, and even Fitzgerald’s rendering has survived remarkably well, having been continuously in print since it first appeared in English in 1859. Hundreds of separate editions and re-issues of the Ruba’iyat have been published; it is ‘one of the most universally known of all poems’, as has often been stated, and, with nearly 130 illustrators having worked on the poems at different times and in different lands, it remains probably ‘one of the most widely illustrated of all literary works’. The illustrations by Gilbert James (in the book that I retrieved for myself), the types of men and women he visualises — the poet himself, his beloved, the wine-cup bearer — all draw upon the then well-known Qajar style of painting in Iran and have a certain measure of charm. But he, as far as can be established, was not the very first western illustrator of Fitzgerald’s renderings: there was at least one before him who published his work in Boston, and there have been many after him. But then this is the manner in which it has gone on: last year was the 150th anniversary of the first ever publication of Fitzgerald’s slim volume.

It is not easy to think at the same time of a language in which Omar Khayyam has not been translated: translations in European languages, ranging from German and French to Russian and Spanish, apart, in our own land, one knows that he has been translated at least into Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Bengali, Oriya, Hindi and Urdu.

But to go back to the original. Omar Khayyam, who lived and died at Naishapur in eastern Iran, born c. 1048, died 1131, was a man of his times: now in favour with the high and the powerful of his land and now out of it. But he was singularly gifted: besides being a poet, which also in many ways means being a philosopher, he was a mathematician and an astronomer of marked abilities. When his Sultan set about reforming the Islamic calendar, he was one of the persons chosen to work on the project, ultimately ushering in what is called the Jalali era. A number of astronomical tables are associated with him, and he wrote a treatise in algebra. All this, considering that he came from a humble background — the name or pen-name Khayyam means a ‘tent-maker’, and he even alludes to this, saying in one of his verses, "Khayyam who stitches the tents of wisdom/ has fallen in grief’s furnace ...", or again,

"The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life... ." — is truly remarkable. But, in the memory of generations, what he lives on is as a poet who wrote those little four-line verses called rubai’s. These rhyming quatrains, terse and compacted like precious stones, each line of equal length, contain within themselves whole worlds as it were.

Contrary to the general impression, they are not all about an epicurean life, celebrating wine and luxury; nor are they all mystical. Behind and within each is a view of life: an awareness of its fragility but also of the riches it holds. From ruba’i to ruba’i, Omar Khayyam moves on, speaking now of "that inverted Bowl we call the Sky", now of the "Bird of Time", and now of "the Winter garment of Repentance". The association of his verses with wine and drinking is not without a point, for he did bring those in, but he was constantly, and all along, speaking of life: thus,

"And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

And, once departed may return no more."

One of the rubai’s, in an Urdu rendering by Naresh Kumar Shaad if I remember aright, goes something like this:

"Hui jo shaam to bolaa yeh peer-i maikhaana

mabaada maut na bhar daale uska paimaana".

Celebration, but also those nagging intimations of mortality.

There have been many who have found fault with Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam, saying that he moved too far away from the original. There have also been many, from A.J. Arberry to Robert Graves in English, who have tried their own hand at it. But nothing has survived as well as Fitzgerald’s renderings. And one recalls his own words, in a letter he wrote to Cowell who led him first to Omar Khayyam’s work, explaining his approach to translation. "I suppose very few people have taken such pains in translation as I have" he said, "though certainly not to be literal. But at all cost, a thing must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse life if one can’t retain the original’s better. Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle."

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