Glass Book. GojpghtN .. \Ro_oJ COEXRI6HT DEPOSIT. HE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR K H A Y Y A M Comprising the METRICAL TRANS LAT IONS - A* University Press • John Wilson and Son • Cambridge, U.S.A. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page NTRODUCTION— Jessie B. RUtenhouse vii THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM To Omar Khayyam — Andrew Lang xxxvii Omar Khayyam, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia i Edward FitzGerald's Version 19 Notes by Edward FitzGerald 45 Variations in the Text of the First, Second and Third Editions of FitzGerald's Translation 52 THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM Omar Khayyam — Justin Hardly McCarthy 69 Justin Huntly McCarthy's Version 71 THE QUATRAINS OF OMAR KHAYYAM On Reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a Kentish Rose Garden — mathilde 'Blind 149 E. H. Whinfield's Version 151 APPENDIX Comparative Stanzas 227 Bibliography 233 INTRODUCTION IF Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the artist-poet and mystic, had not been lounging one day about the book- stalls of Piccadilly, dipping now into the " far- thing " and now into the "penny box," in search of treasure, the " Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" would doubtless have sunk still deeper under the dusty piles of unsalable old books and waited another decade for a discoverer. It was already wearing on to a decade since the little quarto pamphlet in its brown paper wrappers — " Beg- garly disguise as to paper and print, but magnificent vesture of verse " — had been issued from the press of Mr. Bernard Quaritch at the sum of five shillings, and, failing of buyers, had fallen by natural stages to the ignominy of the "penny box." > The translator had given the two hundred copies as a present to the publisher, a generosity not likely to be appreciated, in view of its results, and had retained fifty copies for distribution among his friends ; but as if, on second thought, affrighted at his own boldness, only three of the fifty found their way beyond the study shelves. " Cowell, to whom I sent a copy," says FitzGerald in one of his letters, " was naturally alarmed at it ; he being a very religious man ; nor have I given any other copy but to George Borrow, to whom I had once lent the Persian, and to old Donne, when he was down here the other day, to whom I was showing a passage in another book, which brought my old Omar up." vii RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM Whether or not the pamphlet that Rossetti bore home from Piccadilly was the first that had been rescued from the penny box, it was at least the first that had made a personal appeal to its buyer. All the imagination of the poet, and his circle of dream-sown spirits, was quickened by it, and in that brotherhood of artists and mystics, styled the " Pre-Raphaelites," the study of the " Rubaiyat " grew into a cult and Omar came at last into his own. Most enthusiastic of this band of friends, and des- tined to do most for the vogue of Omar, were the poet Swinburne, and the future Oriental scholar, Captain Richard Burton. To Swinburne, aglow by tempera- ment with the colour, passion, and imagery of the East- ern thought, Omar became a transfused self, so dominating his fancy that hie began to write in the Omaric metre ; and to Captain, afterward Sir Richard, Burton, he spoke with equal sympathy, so that in the "Lay of the Higher Law" we find an exceedingly Khayyamesque atmosphere, and the free use of several of Omar's best known symbols. That Omar should fast make his way when once discovered, was in the natural course of things, and in 1868 a new edition was forthcoming, expanded from seventy-five to one hundred and ten quatrains, with the original renderings much modified, and somewhat weakened, perhaps, as twice-wrought things are likely to be. The new quatrains, however, were strong viii INTRODUCTION enough to compensate for the loss of fire and verve in the remodelled ones, and the Omaric cult developed and spread like an infection ; but the translator, the almost shy recluse, who " took as much pains to avoid fame as others did to seek it," remained behind his veil of anonymity, and it was known to very few who delighted in the " Rubaiyat," by whom they had been " Rendered into English Verse." In 1863 Mr. Ruskin intrusted to Mrs. Burne-Jones, as being the wife of a " Pre-Raphaelite," among whom the Persian quatrains had first been known, a letter addressed, " To the Translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar; " but it would appear that she herself was no more enlightened upon the matter, for after keeping the letter nearly ten years, she handed it to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, who had written in the North American ReMeiv for October 1869 a critique upon the second edi- tion of the " Rubaiyat." If the name of the translator was known to Mr. Norton at that time, at least his "local habitation" was not, and he in turn sent the letter to Thomas Carlyle, who, after a full ten years' interval from the original date, transmitted it to Edward FitzGerald. The letter of Carlyle to FitzGerald, with the Ruskin and the Norton inclosures, is interesting and charac- teristic : Chelsea, 14th April, 1873. Dear FitzGerald, — Mr. Norton, the writer of that note, is a distin- guished American (co-editor for a long time of the North American ix RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM Review), an extremely amiable, intelligent, and worthy man, with whom I had some pleasant walks, dialogues, and other communica- tions of late months, in the course of which he brought to my knowl- edge, for the first time, your notable Omar Khayyam, and insisted on giving me a copy from the third edition, which I now possess, and duly prize. From him, too, by careful cross-questioning, I identified beyond dispute the hidden FitzGerald, the translator; and, indeed, found that his complete silence and unique modesty in regard to said meritorious and successful performance was simply a feature of my own Edward F. ! The translation is excellent ; the book itself a kind of jewel in its way. I do Norton's message without the least delay, as you perceive. Ruskin's message to you passes through my hands sealed. I am ever your affectionate T. CARLYLE. But if the discovery of FitzGerald by the public was an accident, no less was the discovery of Omar by FitzGerald himself an accident. Genius stumbles often upon its destined treasure when faring upon some other quest ; and the quest with the gentle FitzGerald was fellowship : " I amuse myself," he wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1853, " with poking out some Persian, which E. Cowell would inaugurate me with ; I go on with it because it is a point in common with him and enables us to study a little together." His first acquaintance was with Hafiz and Sadi, such examples of their art as are illustrative of the Persian values ; but probably from hesitancy to encroach upon the work of his friend Cowell, who was translating Hafiz, as well as from over-modesty in his estimate of himself, he did not at first attempt so ambitious a flight, but addressed himself instead to Jami, whose x INTRODUCTION " Salaman and Absal " he transferred, without the loss of Oriental color, to our somewhat colorless tongue, in a manner that merits a reading and a comment that it has not received, especially in the light of its effect upon the subsequent rendering of the " Rubaiyat." In reading Jami, FitzGerald's hand was broken in to his art, and the essence of the art itself so infused with his own thought that it became no longer art, but tempera- ment, and spoke in the translation of Omar as if an original word. Jami was a Sufi, and the spirituality of his verse is in striking contrast to the materiality of Omar ; but there is a similarity of phrase, and even at times of spirit, that shows what a preparation for the rendering of the one would be the rendering of the other. As, for illustration, Jami says to the Divine : " Leave me room On that Divan which leaves no room for Twain ; Lest, like the simple Arab in the tale, I grow perplext, Oh God ! twixt Me and Thee : If / — this Spirit that inspires me, whence ? If Thou — then what this sensual Impotence?" Is this not in the mood and manner of Omar ? and although Jami believed in — " Reason that resolves the knot of either world, And sees beyond the Veil," while Omar declares — " There was a Veil past which I could not see," the essential matter is that FitzGerald brought to Omar a perfected touch from the skill with which he * xi RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM had strung the loose pearls of Jami on the thread of allegory. Certain sources of FitzGerald's inspiration have been discovered in Attar and Hafiz, but they are none the less to be found in Jami. Soon after the publication of "Salaman and Absal," Mr. Cowell removed to Calcutta, where he had been appointed Professor of History at the Presidency Col- lege, and in the letters that passed between the friends during the subsequent months of 1856, we begin to find a mention of Omar, who was just beginning to make his appeal to FitzGerald. First, of the copy of the Bodleian manuscript, which FitzGerald made (from the copy transcribed for him originally by Prof. Cowell) and sent with his compliments to Garcin de Tassy, the French student of Oriental literature, who, as soon as he had familiarized himself a bit with it, hastened to write a paper upon Omar for the Journal Asiztique, thus winning to France the credit of an earlier acquaintance with the old Persian. It must be acknowledged, how- ever, that he first sent a note to FitzGerald proposing in his paper to mention both the researches of himself and Prof. Cowell into the Persian literature, but again FitzGerald's modesty prompted him to refuse the mention. In a letter to Cowell he says, referring to de Tassy : " He proposes his writing an article in the Journal Asiedique on it in which he will • honourably mention' E. B. C. and E. F. G. I now write to deprecate all this, putting it on the ground (and a fair one) xii INTRODUCTION that we do not yet know enough of the matter ; that I do not wish E. B. C. to be made answerable for errors which E. F. G. (the " copist ") may have made ; and that E. F. G. neither merits nor desires any honourable mention as a Persian scholar, being none." After de Tassy had written his paper, in which there is every reason to infer that the discovery of the Bod- leian manuscript was his own, he writes to FitzGerald that he has read it before the Persian Ambassador and his suite, who were much pleased with his quotations. " So you see," he adds, " I have done the part of an ill subject in helping France to ingratiate herself with Persia when England might have had the start." There is something to be said, however, for his frank- ness, as well as for the alertness of the French ambition. In the meantime, Edward FitzGerald, in the ease and picturesqueness of his country life, was shaping into exquisite form the Persian quatrains, by repeating them aloud, to test their music and strength, on his solitary walks. Such pictures as these appear from time to time in his letters to his beloved Cowell : " When in Bedfordshire, I put away almost all books, except Omar Khayyam, which I could not help looking over in a paddock covered with buttercups and brushed by a delicious breeze, while a dainty racing filly of W. Browne's came startling up to wonder and sniff about me. " You would be sorry, too, to think that Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me! Poor fellow; I think of him and Oliver Basselin and Anacreon; lighter shadows among the shades, perhaps, over which Lucretius presides so grimly." xiii RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM In a later letter we come upon this charming pas- sage: "June over! a thing I think of with Omar-like sorrow, and the roses here are blowing — and going — as abundantly as even in Persia. I am still at Geldestone, and still looking at Omar by an open window, which gives over a greener landscape than yours." During the preceding month Professor Cowell had sent him a copy of the Calcutta manuscript of the " Rubaiyat," and this had been carefully compared with the Bodleian, to the end that on July 13, 1857, he writes : "By to-morrow I shall have finished my first Physiognomy of Omar, whom I decidedly prefer to any Persian I have yet seen, unless perhaps Salaman." Of this "first Physiognomy" he says in the subse- quent year, when it had been retouched for publication: " My translation will interest you from its form, and also in many respects in its detail, very unliteral as it is. Many quatrains are mashed together, and something lost, I doubt, of Omar's simplicity, which is so much a virtue in him. But there it is, such as it is." FitzGerald's first disposition of the'poem was to give it, in January of 1858, to Parker, of Fra.se/ s Magazine — that is, what he termed the "less wicked" of the quatrains. " Since then," he writes to his friend, in September of the same year, " I have heard no more ; so, as I suppose, they don't care about it; and may be quite right." xiv INTRODUCTION It was evident as time went on that they did not "care about it," and in November he writes again: "As to Omar, I hear and see nothing of it in Fraser yet. . . I told Parker he might find it rather dangerous among his Divines ; he took it, however, and keeps it. I really think I shall take it back ; add some stanzas which I kept out for fear of being too strong ; print fifty copies and give away ; one to you, who won't like it neither. Yet it is most ingeniously tesselated into a sort of Epicurean Eclogue in a Persian Garden." In January we find him informing Cowell that he had recalled the poem, and was to enlarge it to " near as much again of such matter as he would not dare to put in Fraser," and print it, which resolve took definite shape, as we have seen, during the late winter of 1859. While FitzGerald was so careful to conceal his own identity, and put so low a valuation upon his own per- formance in letters, calling his talent the " feminine of genius," he was still human, and having created a work of art it pained him as much as another that it should come into the world still-born. There is a pathetic note in the following letter to Cowell : " I sent you poor old Omar, who has his kind of consolation for all these things. I doubt you will regret you ever introduced him to me. ... I hardly know why I print any of these things, which nobody buys ; and I scarce now see the few I give them to. But when one has done one's best, and is sure that that best is better than so many will take pains to do, though far from the best that might be done, one likes to make an end of the matter by print. I suppose very few people have ever taken such pains in translation as I have, though XV RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 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." FitzGerald, through the years in which his work was traversing the sliding scale to the penny box, kept hop- ing that his friend Cowell would edit Omar and thus give the old Persian his rightful place, and the letters of this period are full of reference to the subject. One extract will show his point of view : " I suppose you would think it a dangerous thing to edit Omar ; else, who so proper ? Nay, are you not the only man to do it ? And he certainly is worth good re-editing. I thought him from the first the most remarkable of the Persian poets, and you keep finding out in him evidences of logical fancy which I had not dreamed of. I dare say these logical riddles are not his best, but they are yet evidence of a strength of mind which our Persian friends rarely exhibit, I think. ... I doubt I have given but a very one-sided version of Omar ; but what I do only comes up as a bubble to the surface and breaks ; whereas you, with exact scholarship, might make a lasting impres- sion of such an author." As a matter of fact Prof. Cowell had written a schol- arly paper upon Omar in the Calcutta, ^evtew, compiled from the texts of the Calcutta and Oxford manuscripts ; but this did nothing for the " Rubaiyat " in England, and it was only by biding his time through the nearly ten years' obscurity that FitzGerald had the gratification of seeing his " old Omar " come into congenial fellow- ship ; for it was purely for Omar's sake and not his own that he desired the recognition, inasmuch as the subse- quent editions of 1872 and 1879 came out anonymously, xvi INTRODUCTION as the first and second had done ; and in 1882, the year before his death, we find him writing to Mr. Shiitz Wilson, who had proposed contributing a critical paper upon Salaman : " As to the publication of my name, I believe I could well dispense with it, were it other and better than it is. But I have some unpleas- ant associations with it ; not the least of them being that it was borne, Christian and surname, by a man who left College just when I went there. 1 . . . What has become of him I know not ; but he, among other causes, has made me dislike my name, and made me sign my- self (half in fun, of course) to my friends, as I now do to you, sincerely yours ' (The Laird of) LITTLEGRANGE." Almost every incident connected with the gentle Fitz- Gerald is picturesque, from the coasting trips that he used to take with his faithful old boatman aboard his yacht, the " Scandal " — so named because that was the staple amusement of the village — to the walks and talks with Cowell, his " own familiar friend," along the lanes of Woodbridge ; and one loves to linger over these asso- ciations, but there is a more necessary word to be said in regard to the fidelity of FitzGerald's work in the light of more recent interpretations, both in metre and prose. It would be wearisome and futile to reopen the con- troversy that has been so well waged by eminent schol- ars, with H. G. Keene, Mrs. Cadell and other translators of the " Rubaiyat " declaring that FitzGerald had pro- duced a beautiful poem that is not Omar ; that there 1 Edward Marlborough FitzGerald, of unpleasant notoriety. ii xvii RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM is, for instance, no "Door of Darkness" in the Per- sian imagery, and that many other of the most brilliant and daring of FitzGerald's figures have no proto- type in the original ; and with such scholars as Mr. Charles Eliot Norton and Dr. Talcott Williams taking the middle ground, that it is rather a poetic transfusion than a translation. This is perhaps the most tenable view, but it no longer requires a knowledge of Persian to form one's own opinion with at least approximate accuracy. As will be seen by consulting the biblio- graphy, there are now several English translations of the " Rubaiyat" that may be had in book form, as well as many partial renderings that have appeared in maga- zines, and by going to the literal prose versions of Mr. Justin Huntly McCarthy and Mr. Edward Heron-Allen, one may not only discover for himself the sources of his favourite FitzGerald quatrains, but he may also com- pare the other poetical renditions with these literal originals. Nothing could be more fascinating. He will soon discover that FitzGerald was his own best critic, and that when he said that he had " mashed together " many of the " Rubaiyat," he epitomized his whole method of translation — and Omar gains im- mensely by the process. Even wine, roses, and night- ingales cease to appeal when one's senses are steeped in 845 quatrains of them, and not the least charm of FitzGerald's art was its restraint, and its power to distil the essence of a hundred roses into one. xviii INTRODUCTION In reading Mr. McCarthy's translation one constantly comes upon passages which he recognizes as from the same original as certain ones of FitzGerald's, but in which the latter has used only part of the thought, discarding the rest, or embodying it in another stanza. For example, Mr. McCarthy thus renders a celebrated quatrain. " Since life flies, what matters it whether it be sweet or bitter ? Since our souls must escape through our lips, what matters it whether it be at Naishaptir or Babylon ? Drink, then, for after thou and I are dust the moon will for many days pass from her last to her first quarter, and from her first to her last." And FitzGerald, seizing the essential spirit of the lines, while discarding the elaboration, turns it into this gem : " Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one." Comparisons need not be multiplied from Mr. McCar- thy's version, since one will be enabled in this volume to make such for himselfybut the same phase of Fitz- Gerald's work may be considered from the literal rendition of Mr. Edward Heron-Allen, which is not so accessible to American readers. Mr. Heron-Allen says that during twelve years' study both of the Cal- cutta and Oxford manuscripts, he has been interested in tracing out the originals of FitzGerald's quatrains, or xix RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM individual lines, and finds that there are very few lines in the latter's rendering that do not exist more or less closely in the Persian. He has further discovered that the inspiration of several of the stanzas that have puzzled the student of FitzGerald's work, came from the Mantik ut tair of Attar, which he had been study- ing just prior to his rendering of the " Rubaiyat." He has found in this work the originals of the quatrains beginning, " Oh Thou! who Man of baser Earth didst make," and " Heaven but the vision of fulfilled Desire," also the noble distich, " Earth could not answer, nor the Seas that mourn In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn." The scholarly work of Mr. Heron-Allen is full of new light for the lover of Omar, and while he has not aimed at beauty of rendering, a prose translation that follows the original line by line is a most valuable basis for comparative study. He has confined himself to the quatrains of the Bod- leian manuscript, 158 in number, and to follow these and select from them a line here, or a line there, possi- bly a couplet or an entire quatrain which one recog- nizes at once as a FitzGerald original, is like building up for oneself a beautiful mosaic. It is certainly true that FitzGerald largely destroyed the verisimilitude of his work by giving it a continuity that does not exist in Omar. Each quatrain in the xx INTRODUCTION original is a detached thought, and with no consecutive arrangement other than an alphabetical one ; whereas in FitzGerald there is a certain unity that has been obtained by selecting fragmentary thoughts and render- ing and grouping them so as to form an Oriental poem, rather than a handful of loose gems as in the original. But this arrangement renders it far more delightful to English readers, and when it has been discovered that there exists in Omar a prototype for nearly all of Fitz- Gerald's lines, we have no quarrel with the translator for transposing them to suit his own fancy. It will be interesting to see how close are some of FitzGerald's renditions to the literal, and then to examine a few " mosaics." Mr. Heron-Allen thus renders a familiar quatrain : " In great desire I pressed my lips to the lip of the jar, To inquire from it how long life might be attained ; It joined its lip to mine and whispered : — * Drink wine, for, to this world, thou returnest not.' " And FitzGerald says (second edition) : " Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn I leaned, the secret Well of Life to learn ; And Lip to Lip it murmur'd — ' While you live, Drink ! — for, once dead, you never shall return.' " Heron-Allen : " O soul ! if thou canst purify thyself from the dust of the body, Thou, naked spirit, canst soar in the heavens, The Empyrean is thy sphere, — let it be thy shame, That thou comest and art a dweller within the confines of earth." xxi RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM FitzGerald (second edition) : " Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside, And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, Is 't not a shame — is 't not a shame for him So long in this Clay suburb to abide ! " Heron-Allen : " I saw a potter in the bazaar yesterday, He was violently pounding the fresh clay, And that clay said to him, in mystic language, 1 1 was once like thee — so treat me well.' " FitzGerald (first edition) : " For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day, I watch'd the Potter thumping his wet Clay : And with its all obliterated Tongue It murmur'd — ' Gently, Brother, gently, pray ! * " Heron-Allen : " This vault of heaven, beneath which we stand bewildered, We know to be a sort of magic-lantern : Know thou that the sun is the lamp-flame and the universe is the lamp, We are like figures that revolve in it." FitzGerald (fourth edition) : " We are no other than a moving row Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go Round with the Sun-illumin'd Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show." And the lovers of a " Book of Verses " will delight in knowing that this sentiment came straight from the heart of Omar. Mr. Heron-Allen thus interprets it : xxii INTRODUCTION " I desire a little ruby wine and a book of verses, Just enough to keep me alive, and half a loaf is needful ; And then, that I and thou should sit in a desolate place Is better than the kingdom of a sultan." How near this is, to — " A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow ! " and yet what infinite charm it has gathered from the touch of FitzGerald ! One might go on indefinitely citing close parallels, many in their entirety, like these, but more inlaid piece by piece, as has been mentioned. As an illustration of this constructive process of FitzGerald's we find in Mr. Heron-Allen's version, quatrain 134, this partial prototype : " This heavenly vault is like a bowl, fallen upside down, Under which all the wise have fallen captive. Choose thou the manner of friendship of the goblet and the jar They are 1 lip to lip, and blood has fallen between them." And quatrain 41 reads : " The good and the bad that are in man's nature, The happiness and misery that are predestined for us — Do not impute them to the heavens, for in the way of wisdom Those heavens are a thousandfold more helpless than thou art." 1 The italicized words, the translator explains, do not properly appear in the original, but are inserted by him to render the meaning more intelligible. XX111 RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM FitzGerald, discarding the last two lines of the first quatrain, and the first two of the last, combines the other four in this spirited manner: " And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd, we live and die Lift not your hands to It for help — for It As impotently moves as you or I." While we have gained a beautiful stanza from this bold transposition, it is certain in this instance that FitzGerald destroys the thought of Omar by such a combination. One more example will suffice to show this process of selection. Mr. Heron-Allen says : " From the beginning was written what shall be ; Unhaltingly the Pen writes, and is heedless of good and bad; On the First Day He appointed everything that must be — Our grief and our efforts are vain." This, with complementary thought selected from other quatrains of Omar, has been expanded by Fitz- Gerald into two stanzas, 71 and 73 of the fourth edition : " The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. With Earth's first Clay they did the Last Man knead, And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed : And the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read." xxiv INTRODUCTION The more widely one studies the different versions, the more is he impressed with the fine discrimination of FitzGerald in the use of Omar's best material, and in the art that could so vitalize the spirit while ignoring so much of the substance. When so much is omitted, however, there is likely to be but a partial interpretation of the author, and it is obvious in comparing the translations that while FitzGerald has done the old Persian good service in blotting out many of his offences, by silence concerning them, — he has done him an ill service in preserving silence upon some of his virtues. In the translation of Mr. Whinfield, in this volume, and in that of our American scholar, John Leslie Garner, as well as in the rendering of Mrs. Cadell and others, Omar appears to a much better advantage on the spiritual side of things than he does in the stanzas of FitzGerald. It requires little discernment to see that he talked far more than he acted, and that his arraignment of the Deity is largely a bravado to conceal his misgiving and unrest. One can- nothold, however, to the extreme view of Mens. Nicolas that Omar was a Sufi, veiling Divinity under a symbol of Wine ; since Omar himself repudiates this assump- tion by his scorn of the Sufi. The keynote of the " Rubaiyat " is an ironical protest against the ceremo- nials and doctrines of Sufism. Omar's voice was free, satirical, often defiant; and yet he was driven onward through his "spangle of Existence" by a haunting xxv RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM desire to know the Secret, to find the "single Alif" that should be the clue to the Master. Mr. H. G. Keene, who has translated a number of the Rubaiyat, has this redeeming quatrain : " If I drink wine it is not for delight, 1 Nor unto holiness to do despite ; I drink to breathe a little, free from self, No other cause could make me drink all night." And Whitely Stokes draws the veil a little further aside : " I cannot reach the Road to join with Thee ; I cannot bear one breath apart from Thee ; I dare not tell this grief to any man ; Ah hard ! Ah strange ! Ah longing sweet for Thee ! " Mr. Whinfield, as will be observed, has many quat- rains that show the other self of Omar, and Mr. John Leslie Garner has also penetrated deeply into this unrest. Two Rubaiyat in his rendering may be cited as illustrative : " When thee, my soul, in wine's strong chains I bind, Who comes to thee upon the desert wind ? Who is this mighty being who without Is none the less the God within thee shrined ? Oh, Allah, grant my wounded heart Thy rest ; 2 Be merciful unto my grief-torn breast ; Forgive these feet that bring me to the inn ; Forgive this hand that takes the vine's bequest." i See McCarthy, C XXX; Whinfield, XXXIX. 2 See McCarthy, CCCC XXIII. XXVI INTRODUCTION Often, too, in varying phrase, recurs this desire : " And now I fain would know if sins of mine Can overthrow Thy mercy at the last." Instead of saying with Mr. Andrew Lang, " No Man so sure as Omar once was sure " we should say, no one so unsure ; for Omar is ever groping and never finding, and his abandonment to the senses is always reaction- ary. It is after he has "eagerly frequented Doctor and Saint," and addressed himself to the " rolling Heaven," and gone in vain " down on the stubborn floor of Earth," — that he finally leans his lip to the "poor earthen Urn " that bids him — " Drink ! " He has pon- dered too much, and in sheer weariness at mysticism and cant, comes back to the old dictum : " Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit Of This and That endeavor and dispute ; Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit." Omar was a hopeless fatalist, yet longing to hope ; and inclined, very properly, from a fatalistic standpoint, to lay the blame for this Sorry Scheme of Things upon the One who planned it. Mr. Garner has two strong quatrains in this mood : 1 " I am as from Thy Crucible I came, A base alloy and conscious of my shame. Why should I strive my erring ways to mend ? 'T is Thine, Oh, Allah, and not mine the blame ! i See Whinfield, LVI and C XXVIII. xxvii RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM li( Lives there a man who keepeth each decree ? — And if I err, 't is writ Thou chastenest me. What ! if I sin, and in return Thou strikest, What is the difference between me and Thee." Had evolution, both natural and spiritual, been demon- strated before Omar's time, we may believe that it would have unlocked the Door to which he " found no Key"; but without Science he could not grasp what was being dimly foreshadowed, and that the Creator should " From His helpless Creature be repaid Pure Gold for what He lent him dross-allay'd " was to him only insolence, instead of beneficent law. Taking into account this fatalism, and the retrogression from intellectual and spiritual to material which one finds in Omar, even though stirred, as has been shown, with a high unrest, — there is very little from a philo- sophical standpoint in his work for the Western world and the Twentieth Century. There are, however, cer- tain eternally modern thoughts, such as that splendid epitome of all philosophy, " I, myself, am Heaven and Hell," that will be a residuum after any analysis. In bringing into one volume the " Rubaiy&t " in three interpretations, one may get much closer to the real nature of the Persian. Mr. Whinfield's translation, having been published only in England, is compara- i See Whinfield, CC XXIX ; McCarthy, CCCC XXV. xxviii INTRODUCTION tively unfamiliar to American readers ; but from its acknowledged accuracy as well as art, an acquaintance with it will be interesting and valuable. It was the outgrowth of intimate study of the Persian and other Oriental literature, entered upon while the translator was in the Bengal Service and is especially valuable from the fact that Mr. Whinfield has not only col- lated the various manuscripts of Omar for the most authentic quatrains, but has carefully sifted from the mass of fugitive Rubaiyat attributed to him those that seem to bear strongest evidence of the master's hand. The quatrains are also translated in their original grouping, and each in its entirety, which renders the work much closer to the original than that of Fitz- Gerald. Mr. Whinfield's translation is well known in England, and has received there the endorsement of all Omaric scholars. In his preface he discusses at some length the duality of Omar's nature, and concludes that " his philosophi- cal studies would naturally stimulate his skeptical and irreligious disposition, while his mystical leanings would operate mainly in the contrary direction." " His poems," adds the translator, " were obviously not all written at one period of his life, but from time to time, just as circumstances and mood suggested, and under the influence of the thoughts, pas- sions, and desires which happened to be uppermost at the moment. It may be that the irreligious and Epicurean quatrains were written in youth, and the devotional only in riper years. But this hypothe- sis seemed to be disproved by Shahrastani's account of him, which is quite silent as to any such conversion or change of sentiment on his xxix RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM part, and also by the fact that he describes himself from first to last as a halter between two opinions, and as a backslider in his practice." The mention of Omar by Shahrastani, who was born in 479 A.H. and lived for some time at Naishapur, is interesting from its personal picture of the poet: " Omar al Khayyam, Imam of Khorasan, and the greatest scholar of his time, was versed in all the learning of the Greeks. He ware wont to exhort men to seek the One Author of all by purifying the bodily actions in order to the sanctification of the soul. He also used to recommend the study of Politics as laid down in Greek authors. The later Sufis have caught at the apparent sense of parts of his poems and accommodated them to their own canon, making them a subject of discussion in their assemblies and conventicles, but the esoteric sense consists in axioms of natural religion and principles of universal obligation. "When the men of his time an- athematized his doctrines, and drew forth his opinions from the concealment in which he had veiled them, he went in fear of his life, and placed some check on the sallies of his tongue and his pen. He made the pilgrimage, but it was from accident rather than piety, still betraying his unorthodox views. On his arrival at Baghdad the men who prosecuted the same ancient studies as he flocked to meet him, but he shut the door in their faces, as one who had renounced those studies and cultivated them no longer. On his return to his native city he made a practice of attending the morning and evening prayers and of disguising his private opinions, but for all that, they were no secret. In astronomy and in all philosophy he was without a rival, and his eminence in those sciences would have passed into a proverb had he only possessed self-control." In the fact of Omar's wide learning, his studies in youth with the theologian Imam Muaffik, who indoc- trinated him with the conception of God as the " Only- Real Agent," leaving no room for the determining power of Will ; his later familiarity with the Moslem XXX INTRODUCTION philosophers and the Sufi mystics, as well as in the skeptical effect of scientific studies upon his thought, — Mr. Whinfield finds the explanation of the two phases of his character, or rather the two habits of his mind, since his character is generally conceded to have been more reputable than some of his Bacchanalian stanzas would give one to infer. Omar has perhaps had no interpreter who brought to him so much enthusiasm as did Mr. Justin McCarthy ; he studied Persian solely that he might know Omar. His rendition, while in prose, is such as to stimulate one's poetic sense ; one catches the colour and fancy and sets them to his own rhythm. Whitman says, " The great poems are such as give you to form for yourself poems," and Mr. McCarthy's prose has the qualities of such a poem. In his delightful preface, still warm with first joy, he describes the effect which the reading of FitzGerald's quatrains had upon him: " I drank the red wine of Omar," he says, " from the enchanted chalice of FitzGerald and gloried, as joyously as Omar himself, in the intoxication. The book was not mine to keep, but I knew it almost by heart before I parted with it ; and I speedily had an Omar of my own. From this Omar with infinite pains I made a small copy which I carried about with me, carried with me in wanderings to Italy, and read and re-read ; read in all manner of fair Italian cities, till even now the winds of Verona and the waters of Venice and ' praeceps anio' seem to bear the burden rather of the dear old Persian singer than any echo of Romeo, or Tasso, or Horace. I made myself a kind xxxi RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM of little religion out of Omar ; I became a burden to my friends ; my writings — for I wrote even in those days — seemed with the persis- tency of Hotspur's starling to do little save echo the name of Omar. 11 From the Omar of FitzGerald's incomparable verse to Omar himself the real Omar in his native Persian was a step, but a hard step. ... I struggled with the strange script of the East; I be- came possessed of Mr. Whinfield's edition first, then of Nicolas', the one accompanied by a rendering in English verse, the other by a translation in French prose. With these in such leisure as I could find, and at long intervals, I grappled. My Persian of to-day is at the best but beggarly, but such as it is it has given me infinite pleasure. I have got a little nearer to the great poet of Naishapur." In speaking of the recognition of Omar at nearly the same time in France and England, Mr. McCarthy men- tions that Theophile Gautier was to the translation of Nicolas, what Swinburne was to that of FitzGerald — its most enthusiastic admirer, and Omar's most ardent devotee. " Th6ophile Gautier's words," he says, " help to conjure up a characteristic, delightful picture of Omar Khayyam seated on some wide white terrace at the cool of the day with friends and dancing- girls about him, with cups and jars at hand, with some book of verses hard by, the fair fine Persian script black upon the ivory-tinted vel- lum all gorgeous with blues and reds and powdered with gold. Here the skimmer of the stars set free his soul, laughed at the mollahs, sang his divine songs and ' Loosed his fingers in the tresses of the cypress-slender minister of wine.' Or we may imagine him walking in some garden red with roses and noisy with nightingales, and meditating upon the doom of youth and beauty and the grinding Wheel of Heaven which reduces Jamshid and Kai Khosrou to Pot- ter's clay and bids tulips spring from the cheeks of perished loveli- ness. Or yet again reclining in some green place where the lilies blow like the lazy Horatian child of genius, ' By the smooth head of. some sacred stream,' with wine and rhymes and a delicious friend. xxxii INTRODUCTION But always melancholy, as melancholy as Koheleth yesterday, Scho- penhauer or Julius Bahnsen to-day, filled indeed with what Renan calls ' la grande curiosite,' but wholly unable to gratify it or stifle it." Such picturesque visions as these bespeak the sym- pathetic sight, and it is with this sympathy that Mr. McCarthy approaches Omar. In presenting these versions of the " Rubaiyat " there is no intention of instituting a literary comparison, but simply of bringing together representative translations from the standpoint of fidelity and beauty ; for all must concede that of the many gates by which one may enter Omar's garden, the " Gate which is called Beau- tiful " remains that opened by Edward FitzGerald. JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE. XXXlll The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam The Astronomer-Poet of Persia Rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald TO OMAR KHAYYAM TJfJTlSE Omar, do the Southern freezes fling * " cflbove your Grave, at ending of the Spring, "The Snowdrift of the Petals of the ^ose, The %ild Ifrhite ^oses you J&ere %>ont to sing ? Far in the South I know a Land divine, 1 cAnd there is many a Saint and many a Shrine, (And over all the shrines the blossom blows Of ^oses that l&ere dear to you as Wine* You faere a Saint of unbelieving Days, Liking your Life and happy in Men's Praise; Enough for you the Shade beneath the Bough, Enough to %atch the foild World go its Ways. Dreadless and hopeless thou of Heaven or Hell, Careless of Words thou hadst not Skill to spell, Content to know not all thou knowest now, What's Death? Doth any itl be %>illl So still %ere %e, before the cMonths began That rounded us and shaped us into Man* So still %e shall be, surely, at the last, Seamless, untouched of 'Blessing or of 'Ban I hen Sentac fight li?as fought, Which gave our England for a captive Land, To pious Chiefs of a believing 'Band, ert %>reathing Tfyses — %ho can tell? — Or chanting for some Girl that pleased thee %>ell, Or satst at %>ine in cNjishapur, %>hen dun The twilight Veiled the Field %>here Harold fell! The salt Sea-waves above him rage and roam I c/llong the %hite Walls of his guarded Home ; SNj> Zephyr stirs the Ttyse, hut o f er the Wave The %ild Wind beats the breakers into Foam I cAnd dear to him, as Tfyses 'toere to thee, 'Rings long the Tfyar of Onset of the Sea; The Swan's Path of his Fathers is his Grave: His Sleep, methinks, is sound as thine can be. His ^as the cMge of Faith, %hen all the West Looked to the driest for Torment or for Rest; c/lnd thou < \t>ert living then, and didst not heed The Saint %>ho banned thee or the Saint %>ho blessed! c/lges of 'Progress ! These eight hundred Years Hath Europe shuddered %ith her Hopes or Fears, And novo! — she listens in the Wilderness To thee, and half believetb %hat she hears ! xxxix RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM Hadst thou THE SECRET?