Edward FitzGerald, 1809-1883
Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.
FitzGerald, Stanza VII, 4th ed.
FitzGerald and his Rubáiyát:
Michael Hillmann -- "Now, the study of the Khayyâmic view does not begin with Khayyâm or his age or Iran, but rather with Edward FitzGerald … who introduced Khayyâm as a poet to England and the world, including Iran."
A.S. Byatt -- "The glory of FitzGerald's poem is the strength of the writing. It is at once rich and strange, and familiar with the whole culture into which it entered, with its deliberate echoes of the Bible and Shakespeare ... FitzGerald's verse is insidiously memorable. It sings in the mind, controlled by its steady rapid rhythm and its strong, emphatic, reiterated rhyme, which in turn is made mysteriously open by the one unrhymed line in each verse. Our hearts beat five times for each of our breaths, and the iambic pentameter FitzGerald used is the rhythm of our passing lives themselves."
Ahmad Saidi -- "As a matter of fact FitzGerald's work, despite the praises and plaudits heaped upon it, has been severely criticized by a host of writers and reviewers all over the world ... The point to be made is that as a reproduction, FitzGerald's work is a beautiful piece of poetry, but as a translation it is sadly disappointing. While it conveys the spirit of the Ruba'iyat, it fails to portray the poet's ideas and conclusions as presented in the Ruba'iyat. There is, therefore, a gulf between the original version and FitzGerald's rendition which the present edition [i.e., Ahmad Saidi's Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam] attempts to bridge."
Thomas Wright (from his Life of Edward FitzGerald, 2 vols, 1904) -- Wright recounts FitzGerald's visit in 1882 with his childhood friend, Miss Lynn, to whom he gave some of his publications: "Aware that Miss Lynn had no sympathy with the agnosticism in his great poem, he said to her, 'I shall not give you a copy of Omar Khayyam, you would not like it,' to which she said simply, 'I should not like it.' [Perhaps sharing Miss Lynn's sentiment, is this inscription which I discovered on the fly-leaf of a 1937 edition of the Rubaiyat: "Dear Betty: This book was given to us & we don't like it but we like you, you lucky girl, so it's yours."]
Hasan Javadi -- "Sir William Jones' Persian Grammar gave him [FitzGerald] the first rudiments of Persian, and, when in July 1857 the first ruba'i was rendered into English verse, it was -- as he modestly termed it -- 'a poor Sir William Jones' sort of parody.' ... The publication of the Ruba'iyat was the culmination of a tradition of Persian studies which had begun with Sir William Jones. Emerson, who had hailed 'Omar Chiam' as one of those Persian poets who 'promised to rise in Western Estimation,' in his English Traits rightly discerned 'an irresistible taste of Orientalism in Britain.' This was in 1856, three years before the crowning success of FitzGerald."
Mehdi Aminrazavi--" FitzGerald's lack of interest in the many-sidedness of Khayyam is rather peculiar, and while we are indebted to his translation which introduced Khayyam to the literary community, he is also responsible for the misconceptions he created precisely due to the selective nature of his translations."
J.L. Borges -- "Some critics believe that FitzGerald's Omar is, in fact, an English poem with Persian allusions; FitzGerald interpolated, refined, and invented, but his Rubáiyát seems to demand that we read it as Persian and ancient." [and further] "All collaboration is mysterious . That of the Englishman and the Persian was even more so, for the two were quite different, and perhaps in life might not have been friends; death and vicissitudes and time led one to know the other and make them into a single poet." ("The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald" an article written in 1951 and part of a collection: Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, Viking, Penguin Group, New York 1999, 366-368)
Barney Rickenbacker (Site Administrator) -- In his "new poem," Edward FitzGerald's genius lies in giving voice to what in Khayyaam "presses to be uttered."
Preliminary Remarks/Observations:
For his Ruba'iyat FitzGerald chose material from his source-quatrains, the Ouseley and Calcutta MSS, and patterned what he chose to use into a poem of 101 stanzas (101 stanzas for his third and fourth editions, 1872 and 1879 respectively - the first edition, 1859, had 75 stanzas and the second, 1868, 110). Robert Bernard Martin in his biography of FitzGerald, With Friends Possessed (203-204), described FitzGerald's translation or rendition of khayyaamic material as an "improvisation of Omar's quatrains." Along improvisational lines, and I'm thinking of jazz music, FitzGerald solos in his own style and does so working around and often close to the prevalent "key," the key of Khayyaam.
"A complete poem of individual quatrains was an innovation for only the veriest tyros need to be reminded that in Persian the quatrain is always an absolutely complete and isolated unit, that there is no such thing as a poem composed of a number of quatrains, and that in collections of quatrains the only order observed or recognised is the alphabetical, according to the final letter of the three rhyming half-verses,' Edward G. Browne, Literary History of Persia 2.259.
Edward Heron-Allen cites manuscript evidence for the likely source-quatrains used by FitzGerald. In his introduction to Edward FitzGerald's Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam with their Original Persian Sources, Heron-Allen says that 49 of 101 stanzas are 'faithful and beautiful paraphrases of single quatrains to be found in the Ouseley or Calcutta MSS. or both' and 44 are 'traceable to more than one quatrain and may therefore be termed the "composite" quatrains.'
Now to Stanza VII:
Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing.
FitzGerald, Stanza VII, 4th ed.
Sources of Stanza VII according to Heron-Allen (15-17): "This is another composite quatrain, and the similarity of its sentiment to that of No.94 [i.e., Stanza XCIV, 4th ed.] makes it somewhat difficult to allocate the parallels to it."
Stanza XCIV, FitzGerald:
Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.
"The first two lines come from two quatrains in C [they are, according to H-A, C 431 and 460]."
هر روز برآنم که کنم شب توبه
از جام و پیالهٔ لبالب توبه
اکنون که رسید وقت گل هر غم* نیست
در موسم گل زتوبه یا رب توبه
*Arberry, Romance...197: "Heron-Allen incorrectly printed har gham for tars-am [I have no fear]"
har ruz baraanam ke konam shab towbe
az jaam o piyaale-ye labaalab towbe
aknun ke rasid vaqt-e gol har gham (tarsam) nist
dar mowsem-e gol ze towbe yaa rab towbe
Each morn I vow, "Tonight I shall repent—
Of wine and brimful cup I shall repent."
But Spring now here, how can I keep my vow?
O Lord! of my repentance I repent.
Saidi, quatrain 5
The first two lines of the Calcutta MS #460 are also cited as likely inspiration to FG for his Stanza VII (& XCIV as well):
بشگفت شگوفه می بیار ای ساقی
دست از عمل زهد بدار ای ساقی
beshgeft shekufe mey biyaar ey saqi
dast az ‘amal-e zohd bedaar ey saqi
Flowers are in bloom, bring wine, saqi
Remove any trace of piety, saqi
In this "repentance" quatrain above, several things catch my eye: first is labaalab - "lip to lip, full lip of the cup to eager lip of the drinker, a brimful". The connecting "aa", is it simply a connective between two consonants (if so why not simply "a"? I think it is likely a vestige of Old Iranian and Sanskrit aa to denote among other meanings, motion towards, as I have indicated in "lip to lip" (there is, as a parallel, baraabar, literally "breast to breast"). Second mowsem (-e gol); mowsem is a fixed, appointed time, a time that happens with regularity. Our word monsoon traces its origin to mowsem.
And the fourth line, which I translate literally: in the season of the rose, from repentance, O Lord, (let there be) repentance. towbe indicates both personal repentance, "to turn away from sin" as well as a turning to God to ask forgiveness which only God can give. This is a clever and playful line in the Calcutta MS, where the speaker breaks his vow of repentance now that spring is here, yet to do so, he invokes God, the repentance-granter. The speaker covers both bases. I add Saidi's note on springtime: "Being great lovers of flowers, Iranians cultivate beautiful gardens and derive immense pleasure form the floral glory of spring. Surrounded by roses and intoxicated with the perfumed air, the poet feels too romantic to keep his vow of abstinence.
FitzGerald's final two lines ("The Bird of Time ...and the Bird is on the Wing") "were likely based, as Heron-Allen suggested on line 24 of the Mantiq al-tair of ‘Attar. " (Arberry, Romance... p. 197-198)
Heron-Allen wrote: "The image of the flight of time permeates the whole of the quatrains."
Here is the line from ‘Attar's Mantiq: مرغ گردون در رهش پر میزند , morgh-e gardun dar rahash par mizanad, "The bird of the sky flutters along its appointed path" (H-A)
So, we have travelled from Stanza VII to Stanza XCIV, and we have displayed two Calcutta manuscript sources as well as a line from ‘Attar as likely inspiration for VII. The two Calcutta sources but not the ‘Attar may have influenced Stanza XCIV.
To conclude with a jazz reference for Stanza VII, Ross Russell in his book on Charlie "Bird" Parker, Bird Lives, quotes part of an interview with Parker in a 1949 issue of the British music magazine, Melody Maker: "To each of the questions he responded by reading a stanza from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." And another direct quote by Parker from New Year's Day, 1955: "I never thought I'd live to see 1955." Then the interviewer said that Parker quoted all four lines of Stanza VII! [Charlie Parker was called "Bird" but not from this stanza of the Rubaiyat. The story goes that he stopped the car his jazzgroup was travelling in to collect a dead chicken their car had struck on a back road. When they arrived at their destination for the night, Parker presented the chicken to his hosts who plucked, cleaned and fried it for the musicians. And so, from this incident, he became known as "Bird".]