Date: 1915
Location: London
Speaker: Aga Khan III
Source: Speeches of Aga Khan III – K K Aziz
Full Text
Middle Eastern poets- reasons for interest in Urnar Khayyarn in Europe – the appeal of the Ruba ‘iat – translations by Edward Fitz gerald and Dr. Pollen.
In the halcyon days of Persia’s intellectual renaissance after the Arab conquest, the Middle East is said to have produced more poets than the whole of medieval Europe, but the works of no Oriental author have aroused the same degree of interest in the European mind as the modest “Ruba’iat” of Omar Khayyam. The secret of this phenomenon may be traced to Omar’s thoughts on the inscrutable problems of Life and Death being, to some extent, in harmony with the rational tendencies produced by the collision of modern science with the unquestioning beliefs of a bygone age.
The charm of the “Ruba’iat,” which lies in the intensely human spirit pervading them, is enhanced by the poet’s inimitable direct ness of expression, his terse and incisive phrases and a simple grace of style, with that unrivalled and untranslatable music of words to which the sonorous language of Persia peculiarly lends itself. To reproduce these subtle features of the original in a translation is not an easy undertaking. FitzGerald succeeded in a remarkable degree in bringing out the spirit of Omar’s quat rains in his famous translation, which in some respects transcends the beauty of the original, but to achieve this end he had to diverge from the letter of the “Ruba’iat” as well as from the J sequence of the verses. Dr. ohn:-Pollen in his more faithful translation has accomplished a task of greater difficulty, and has done justice both to the letter and to the spirit of the original.
In its simple and attractive garb the version now offered to the public, for the benefit of the Indian soldiers who are now laying down their lives for the Empire on the battlefields of three continents, deserves to find a place on the bookshelves of the numerous admirers of the Poet in the English-speaking world.
Source: John Pollen, Omar Khayyam, Faithfully and Literally Translated (From the Original Persian), East and West, London, 1915, pp. vii-viii.
In his Introduction, Pollen wrote: “I should also like to express my gratitude to His Highness the Aga Khan, who has so kindly favoured me with the graceful foreword to this little volume. Indeed, I do not think I should have made up my mind to publish this version in book-form had it not been for the cordial encouragement of His Highness who, a Persian scholar himself, saw some merit in my Translation” (p. xvii).
The book is made up of 158 quatrains translated “line for line” from Umar Khayyam, and 12 quatrains from Edward Fitzgerald’s version along with their translation into Esperanto.
Thanks to Edward Fitzgerald’s magnificent rendering of Umar Khayyam’s quatrains, the reading public in the West has, for over a hundred years, known Khayyam better than any other Eastern poet. In fact, it is sometimes claimed that, next to the Bible, the Ruba ‘iat has had the largest sale in the Western world in the present century.
Fitzgerald also inspired many others to present the quatrains to European and American readers in their own languages. Thus it came to pass that Khayyam was, and still continues to be, translated in every Western language.
For the interest of the reader with a literary taste I give below a list of the notable translations:
English: Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1st. edn 1859, 2nd. 1868, 3rd. 1872), E. H. Whinfield (London, 1st. edn 1883, 2nd. 1901), Edward Heron-Alder (London, 1898), J. H. McCarthy (London, 1889), Richard le Gallienne (London, 1897), J. L. Garner (London, 1898), Mrs M. H. Cadell (London, 1899), Frederick Baron Corvo (from the French of Nicolas, London, 1903), E.
F. Thompson, (Worcester, Mass., 1906), G. Roe (Edinburgh, 1907), A. Rogers (Ilford, 1910), C. S. Tute (Exeter, 1926), Friedrich Rosen (London, 1930), J.
C. E. Bowen (London, 1961), R. Graves and Omar Ali Shah (London, 1967), P. Mahmoud (Tehran, 1969), Parichehr Kasra (New York, 1975), A. Christenson (Copenhagen, 1927), W. G. Burton (Ryde, Isle of White, 1968), and Edward Fitzgerald, E. H. Whinfield and A.J. Arberry (London, 1949).
French:J. B. Nicolas (Paris, 1867), Fernand Henry (Paris, 1903),J. H. Hallard (London, 1912), Gareiu de Tassy (Paris, 1857), Pierre Pascal (Rome, 1~58), E.
Desiron (Louvain, 1959) and M. Fouladvand (Paris, 1960).
German: F. Bodenstedt (Breslau, 1881), M. R. Schenck (Halle, 1897), A. F.
Grafen (Stuttgart, 1902) and C. H. Rempis (Tuobingen, 1935).
Russian: R. M. Aliyev (Moscow, 1959).
Dutch: J. van Schagen (Amsterdam, 1947) and J. A. Vooren (Amsterdam, 1955).
Italian: F. Gabrieli (Florence, 1944).
Spanish: Enrique Ponce (Santiago, 1927).
Portuguese: Placido R. Castro (Vigo, 1965).
Swedish: A. E. Hermelin (Lund, 1928).
Polish: Edward Raezyuski (London, 1960).
Welsh: Sir John Morris Jones (Montgomeryshire, 1928).
Hebrew: Joseph Massel (Manchester, 1908).
Latin: H. W. Greene (Boston, Mass., 1898).
On Umar Khayyam and his Ruba’iat see Holbrook Jackson, Edward Fitzgerald and Omar Khayyam, London, 1899; Arthur Christensen, Recherches sur les Rubaiyat de Omar Khayyam, Heidelberg, 1905; J. K M. Shirazi, Life of Omar Khayyam, Edinburgh, 1905; Laurent Tailhads, Omar Khayyam et les poison de [‘intelligence, Paris, 1905; Otto Rothfeld, Umah Khayyam and His Age, London, 1922; Masud Ali Varesi, Umar Khayyam, London, 1922; T. H. Weir, Omar Khayyam the Poet, London, 1926; A. G. Potter, A Bibliography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, London, 1929; Swami Govinda Tirtha, The Nectar of Grace: Omar Khayyam ‘s Life and Works, Hyderabad Deccan, 1941; Harold Lamb, Persian Mosaic: An Imagin ative Biography of Omar Khayyam Based upon Reality, in the Oriental Manner, London, 1943; Ahmad Hamid as – Sarraf, Omar Khayyam … His Life, Works and Rubaiyat, Baghdad, 1949; H. Halbaeh (comp.), Romance of the Rubaiyat, Santa Barbara, 1975; and any respectable history of Persian literature. 521