Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát

CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by The Australian National University FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: A Victorian Invention Esmail Zare-Behtash A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National University August 1994 Unless otherwise indicated, this thesis is based on original research conducted by the author as a research scholar in the Department of English at the Australian National University. (Signed) . ii Contents page Introduction 1 Chapter I: FitzGerald and His Invention 6 1.1. FitzGerald’s literary career and milieu 1.2. Omar’s life and time 1.3. Literature Review Chapter II: Persian Sources and Their Reception 83 2.1. Reception of Persian Literature in Britain 2.2. FitzGerald and Persian Literature Chapter III: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát as a Victorian Product 131 3.1. FitzGerald’s Reinvented Poem 3.2. Victorian Poetry and FitzGerald’s Poem Chapter IV: Reception of the Rubáiyát by theVictorians 188 Bibliography 209 iii Acknowledgment I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor Dr. Simon Haines who was always available and helpful and contributed greatly to the preparation of my thesis. I also wish to thank my adviser Professor A. H. Jones from Asian Studies of A. N. U. whose prompt and helpful comments were most valuable, especially with regard to sections on Omar’s life and time. Dr. David Parker, my adviser and former convener of the postgraduate program, provided constant encouragement and reassurance. I would like to thank Professor Stephen Prickett, a visiting-fellow at A. N. U., for several fruitful conversations in which he introduced me to the background of faith and doubt in the Victorian period. Mr. Graham Cullum, current convener of the post-graduate program, has my deepest gratitude for reading my final draft, despite the many other matters claiming his attention. I would like to thank the officials of the Bodleian Library who have kindly provided me with a photocopy of the Ouseley manuscript of “Rubáiyát-i Hakim Umr [sic] Khiyám.” I wish to express my gratitude to my two sons, and most especially to my wife Parivash for four years of tolerance and encouragement that I never found wanting. Finally, I wish to thank the Department of Scholarship in the Ministry of Culture and Higher Education in Iran, most especially Dr. Ghezel-Ayagh, the Department’s representative in Australia, for facilitating the extension of my scholarship and his consistent encouragement. I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to my examiners for their comments on recasting my thesis and, above all, for their encouragement. iv Abbreviations Letters The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, 4 vols. ed. Alfred Mckinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune, Princeton: University New Jersey, 1980. Life The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Alfred Mckinley Terhune, London:Yale University Press, 1947. Rubáiyát The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th ed. E. FitzGerald, London: B. Quaritch, 1879. Works The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings of Edward FitzGerald, 7 vols. ed. George Bentham, New York: Phaeton Press, 1967. Whinfield The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, 2nd. ed. E. H. Whinfield, London: Octago Press, 1980. v Everybody became my friend out of his own surmise, None sought to discover the secrets in my heart, My secret indeed is not remote from my lament, But Eye and Ear lack the light to perceive it. (Rûmi, “the Song of the Reed”) (tr. A. J. Arberry, Tales from the Masnavi, 21) vi Abstract This study was written in the belief that FitzGerald did not so much translate a poem as invent a persona based on the Persian astronomer and mathematician (but not poet) Omar Khayyám. This “invention” opened two different lines of interpretation and scholarship, each forming its own idea of a “real” Omar based on FitzGerald’s invention. One line sees Omar as a hedonist and nihilist; the other as a mystic or Sufi. My argument first is that the historical Omar was neither the former nor the latter; second, FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát is a “Victorian” product even if the raw material of the poem belongs to the eleventh-century Persia. The Introduction tries to find a place for the Rubáiyát in the English nineteenth- century era. Chapter One sets FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát in perspective. First, it surveys the general background and context to the lives and careers of Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyám in order to show how FitzGerald’s life was affected by some of the main concerns of the period; and that Omar was neither a hedonist nor a mystic; Secondly, it surveys four major critical studies which have generated different approaches to and emphases in the study and the translation of the rubáiyát attributed to Omar Khayyám. Chapter Two reviews some examples of Persian language and literature as they were perceived by British readers and authors and shows the reception of Persian poetry in general up to and including the Victorian period. Then it traces FitzGerald’s progress with Persian literature, showing how the other Persian poets he read influenced his understanding or “creation” of the Rubáiyát, and how he discarded the great Persian poets but retained Omar Khayyám as “his property.” Chapter Three traces FitzGerald’s career as a translator and attempts to give general characteristics of Victorian poetry to show how FitzGerald’s version can be seen a Victorian product. Study of the poetry of the period shows the heterogeneity of Victorian poetry and FitzGerald’s poem is another example of this multiplicity. The Rubáiyát should be read as a revolt against general Victorian values: optimism, earnestness, Puritanism, and science development. Chapter Four accounts for the initial neglect of the poem and then for the popular reception of the Rubáiyát by the Pre-Raphaelites and shows aspects in particular appealed to his contemporaries (like R. Browning) which, in turn, is a way of measuring the success of FitzGerald’s “Victorian” invention. vii Introduction The third and final edition of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám to be published in his life time appeared in 1879. Another edition, however, published posthumously in 1889, reflected revisions that FitzGerald had made before he died. Since the revised edition of 1879, various translators have translated FitzGerald’s “Epicurean Eclogue” (as he himself described it) into different languages. A. G. Potter in his Bibliography of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám records some fifty different languages by 1929.1 The extraordinary popularity of FitzGerald’s rendering of the quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyám generated a significant academic interest in the works and renderings of quatrains ascribed to Omar Khayyám as well as in the relation between the quatrains and the works as a whole (about thirty editions in English before the end of the nineteenth century). Some scholars have attempted to challenge Omar’s authorship of the rubáiyát and produce a more authentic version of the quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyám. Others, however, have worked on the faithfulness of FitzGerald’s translation and some of these again have tried to create a more authentic version. Nevertheless, what was significant to FitzGerald was neither the authenticity of the quatrains nor their literal translation, but something that existed for him in those scattered quatrains: something out of which he wished to “tessellate”2 a beautiful eclogue which would “breathe a sort of consolation” to him. In those quatrains FitzGerald found certain doubts, fears, disillusionments and consolations which troubled a poet or poets centuries ago in Persia. He found in them a new voice for his age, the Victorian period: a 1 A. G. Potter, Bibliography of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1929) ix. 2 According to the OED “tessellate” means “to make into a mosaic; to form a mosaic upon, adorn with mosaic; to construct (esp. a pavement) by combing variously coloured blocks so as to form a pattern.” Forming a pattern refers appropriately to what FitzGerald did with the Persian quatrains. Interestingly 1 convenient voice with which he intended to express the agnosticism and nihilism which he felt as the major threat to the human spirit in his own scientifically minded time. As a voice of this new age, FitzGerald tried, through Omar as his persona, to express the scepticism which was later admired by the Pre-Raphaelites, and since then has been both admired and condemned by so many others. In this respect, FitzGerald was the forerunner and almost the guide of those rebels who did not share the current optimism. There is enough evidence, both in FitzGerald’s letters and in Persian scholarship, to suggest that it was FitzGerald himself who constructed the Omar he “found” in the quatrains: the passionate sceptic who wakes up at dawn sober and contemplative, but who as he thinks and drinks grows savage and blasphemous, until finding himself unable to solve the riddle of his existence he finally sobers back into melancholy at nightfall. Such a subject as well as this structure is entirely FitzGerald’s invention; it is absent from the quatrains attributed not only to Omar Khayyám but also to any other Persian poets. Omar owes the very nature of his reputation as a poet in both the west and the east to FitzGerald’s new version. In other words, without FitzGerald’s so-called Rubáiyát there would only have been Omar Khayyám, an astronomer and mathematician, who occasionally uttered a few quatrains as a diversion when he became tired of his scientific activities. Edward Byles Cowell (1826-1903), FitzGerald’s Persian teacher, to whom FitzGerald was indebted for his first acquaintance with the rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, had a completely different view from FitzGerald’s of Omar and his rubáiyát.

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