The Rubáiyát of Edward FitzOmar
By Gary Sloan

Long ago, in the Protestant hinterlands of northeast Texas, four teenage infidels consecrated their bibulous souls to an eleventh-century Persian astronomer, mathematician, and poet. Each Saturday night, in an old Studebaker, we made a pilgrimage to Hugo, Oklahoma, the nearest wet town, to procure libations of Thunderbird wine. As we meandered homeward on isolated back roads, we swilled the "old familiar juice." Between swigs, we recited quatrains (four-line stanzas) from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the bible for apostate tipplers. The mellifluous verse articulated our incertitude, alienation, and yearning. It also lent a romantic aura to inebriation.

Existential mysteries pricked us:
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Theological patter availed naught:
Why, all the Saints and Sages who discussed
Of the Two Worlds so wisely–they are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scattered, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.
In our salad days (the year before), we sought but did not find:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
How ephemeral and insignificant our lives!
When You and I behind the Veil are past
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea’s self should heed a pebble-cast.
Had we omnipotence, we would build a universe that pandered to human happiness:
Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits–and then
Re-mold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
Carpe diem, lads! "Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape / Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit."

Long after the Studebaker was scrap metal, I realized the vinous lads had exalted the wrong poet. We should have offered oblations to the translator of The Rubáiyát, Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883).

FitzGerald bore the artistry of a demiurge to raw material supplied by Omar. In the Persian manuscripts Fitzgerald consulted (called the Ouseley and the Calcutta), Omar’s rubáiyát (quatrains) are arranged alphabetically, the sequence determined by the last letter of rhyme words. The quatrains have no thematic center or progression. Each quatrain is a self-contained unit. By culling, combining, omitting, patching, and tinkering, FitzGerald conferred order on a welter of variegated musings. "He used Omar’s detached thoughts," said Louis Untermeyer, "and wove them into a design. Imposing continuity on the fragments, he achieved a unity the original never possessed." For his publisher, FitzGerald described the narrative structure he devised: "Omar begins with dawn pretty sober and contemplative; then as he thinks and drinks, he grows savage, blasphemous, etc., and then again sobers down into melancholy at nightfall."

FitzGerald wisely eschewed a literal translation. He imaginatively rendered Omar’s thoughts into the idioms of English, at times creating his own metaphors, imagery, and allusions. Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced FitzGerald to American readers, said: "The Rubáiyát is the work of a poet inspired by the work of a poet; not a copy, but a reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration." An early reader correctly surmised "that the beauties of Omar are largely due to the genius of the translator." While many have translated Omar’s verse (even Clarence Darrow gave it a whirl), all seem poetasters beside Fitzgerald. George Roe, who did a literal translation, paid homage to his gifted predecessor:

FitzGerald has, with the magic touch of genius, infused into the quatrains he has given us more of the spirit of Omar than all the other English translators combined. His work is full of music; he grasps the poet’s meaning with marvelous intuition. With a magnificent disdain of the letter, he presents us with the kernel of the thought; and over the whole he throws the magic mantle of his own personality and talks to us in words that flow from the living depths of a poet’s soul.

Intermittently, FitzGerald worked on the poem for twenty-five years. Five editions, none exactly the same, were published--the first in 1859, the last posthumously in 1890. Few poems have been as often reprinted or as widely esteemed by both literati and ordinary readers. "No other poem," said Alfred Terhune, Fitzgerald’s biographer, "is seen so frequently in the meager libraries of those who make no claim to being either lovers of books or of literature." Some lines are famous: "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou," "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on," "The Flower that once has blown for ever dies," "Take the Cash, and let the Credit go," "The Bird of Time has but a little way / To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing."

While conceding his brilliance, some allege that FitzGerald misrepresented Omar. They contend he was a Sufi mystic, not the impious hedonist limned by FitzGerald. Omar scorned the hollow ritual, observances, anthropomorphism, and eschatological literalism of Muslim orthodoxy, they say, not the "true" Islam. According to Sufi belief, the soul was originally absorbed in God. Salvation lay in re-absorption. To achieve the reunion, one had to extirpate earthly desires and constraints. To conceal their heterodoxy from repressive caliphs, Sufi poets adopted an esoteric symbolism wherein a beloved person represented God; wine, the love of God; and drunkenness, spiritual ecstasy. Omar, the argument runs, cloaked his mysticism in the occult symbols deployed by Háfiz, Attár, Jámi, and other Sufi poets.

The truth may never be known. Two herculean difficulties arise.

First, no one has been able to establish a reliable corpus of Omar’s verse. The known manuscripts, transcribed centuries after his death, are saturated with interpolations, excisions, and accretions. Of the 1,300 or so quatrains attributed to Omar, no one knows how many are actually his. Estimates range from 12 to 250. In A Literary History of Persia, E. G. Browne concluded: "While it is certain that Omar Khayyám wrote many quatrains, it is hardly possible, save in a few exceptional cases, to assert positively that he wrote any particular one of those ascribed to him."

Second, no one really knows whether the references to wine and love are symbolic. Many sound literal. In evaluating a controversial 1967 translation of The Rubáiyát by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, who pronounced the poet a devout Sufi, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement observed: "To prove Khayyám a Sufi involves the dangerous assertion that the poet does not mean what he says."

FitzGerald was convinced Omar disdained Sufism. In a preface to his translation, FitzGerald cited ancient reports that to his Muslim contemporaries, Omar was a bugbear: "His Epicurean audacity of thought and speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own time and country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose practice he ridiculed, and whose faith amounts to little more than his own when stript of its mysticism."

FitzGerald coupled Omar with Lucretius, the Roman expositor of Epicureanism: "Both were men of subtle, strong, and cultivated intellect, fine imagination, and hearts passionate for truth and justice; who justly revolted from their country’s false religion and foolish devotion to it." Omar’s search for transcendent meanings led to an epistemological cul-de-sac. Finding no Legislator to ratify values, Omar pursued "sensual pleasure as the serious purpose of life, and diverted himself with speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and other such questions." "Not that the Persian has anything at all new," FitzGerald told bibliophile William Donne, "but he has dared to say it, as Lucretius did."

FitzGerald may have dressed Omar in his own garb. Though a nominal Anglican, this freethinking scion of nobility kept his own counsel. He preferred Lucretius, Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume to Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther. His Holy Communion comprised offertories of wit and ample stoups of port with boon companions like Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray. Visited late in life by a rector determined to edify the wayward parishioner, FitzGerald was peremptory: "Sir, you might have conceived that a man does not come to my years of life without thinking much of these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected on them fully as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit."

Versed in science (including Darwinism) and theology, as well as the arts, FitzGerald was not so much unwilling as unable to believe. "FitzGerald is best classified as an agnostic," wrote Alfred Terhune. "Although he could not personally find satisfactory answers to the problems of the soul and man’s relation to the Creator, he respected others’ solutions to these enigmas."

In Omar Kháyyám, FitzGerald found a soul mate. "I take old Omar rather more as my property than yours," he told Edward Cowell, a Persian scholar with whom he studied the astronomer-poet. "He and I are more akin. You see all his beauty, but you don’t feel with him the way I do." FitzGerald sometimes called himself "Edward FitzOmar."

One of FitzOmar’s rubáiyát reads:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
Sans wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and–sans End!

In 1959, the advice sounded good to four kids headed to Hugo. Still does.

Gary Sloan is a retired English professor in Ruston, Louisiana. You can reach him at sloangg@bellsouth.net