Incidentally, nobody quite
knows how many rubais Khayyam actually wrote. In the oldest extant manuscript,
copied 500 years ago in Shiraz and now held in the Bodleian Library, there are
158. In later versions, succeeding scribes added more until the total swelled to
nearly 1200. Edward Fitzgerald culled out the essential ones and rendered them
in a free English translation, or as he called it a “transmogrification,” in
1859. He did not pretend to be too faithful to the original, often combining
more than one rubai to make a brilliant whole that reads as one poem and not as
separate epigrammatic quatrains. Incidentally, there was an Indian connection:
his colleague, Prof. Edward Cowell discovered a Persian manuscript of the
rubaiyat in the Asiatic Society of Calcutta and sent it to him. The resulting
book went almost unnoticed and was soon in the one-penny boxes on the streets
until it found admirers in the poets Rosetti and Swinburne (followed by Hardy,
Elliot and Conan-Doyle) and went on to become one of the most famous, essential
and oft-quoted books for the next 100 years. – Navtej
Sarna
By Navtej Sarna
The other day, halfway through a virtual
conversation, or chat, I found myself unable to recall a much loved Rubio Omar
Khayyam. This lapse, unimaginable in one's youth but part of the daily landscape
now, soon had me searching the bookshelves. I was looking for my Omar Khayyam
and, unconsciously, I was looking for that coverless, disintegrating Jaico
edition I had bought in the mid-1970s for two or three rupees from the
booksellers who used to shout “take a look, buy a book” in the corridors of
Connaught Place.
The book with the tempting sketches of the
hedonist resting against a tree and drinking cups of heady wine from the hands
of a sinuous sakiunder a full moon, sketches which, in a summer of artistic
delusion, I copied on chart paper and hung all over my
room.
Beautiful copies
But that book was nowhere to be found; it has not
survived the three dozen years and the dozen or so moves. Instead, I found three
other Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; each an embodiment of pure physical beauty. The
first, barely the size of a pocket dictionary, has a rich rust-brown cover
depicting a medieval garden with intertwining branches, full-bodied roses,
singing birds and fruits in the boughs. Each page featuring a single rubai, or
quatrain in Persian, is framed like a carpet from the same land. The English
version, with 102 rubaiscramped into a few pages, is based on Edward
Fitzgerald's translation from the first of his five editions. This edition can
be distinguished from the later ones by slight differences in some of the
rubais. The most famous of these is: Here with a loaf of bread beneath the
bough,/A flask of wine, a book of verse and thou…….; in the third and later
editions this becomes: A book of verses underneath the bough/A jug of wine, a
loaf of bread – and thou… I found this little gem of a book in the bookshop in
the gardens of Hafiz's tomb in Shiraz, where newly-weds come to seek the
blessings and a turbaned dervish with deep set eyes and a flowing beard walks
around the chai-khanah.
The second is a very slim 1955 production that I
found tucked away in a second-hand bookstore bursting at the seams. The rubais,
again based on Fitzgerald's first edition, are all inscribed on dull yellow
pages and the remarkable accompanying miniature depictions of hedonistic abandon
are in the same yellow and pastel pink. This edition satisfies itself with 75
quatrains and ends with the emblematic signature phrase Tamam Shudor “it is
finished.”
And the third has nothing miniature about it; it
is a large, lush and generous coffee table book entitled The Wine of Nishapur
harking to the capital of Khorasan, which once rivalled Cairo and Baghdad and
where Khayyam was born in 1048, as well as buried in 1131. This book is based on
the belief that in order to fully understand Khayyam, it is not enough to master
the Persian language; one has to be Iranian and have “breathed the same air,
felt the same spring breeze on his cheeks, enjoyed the same picnic in the
meadow…”
Using an all-Iranian team, it combines the
English rendering of 72 rubaisby Karim Emami and the skilful Persian calligraphy
of Nasrollah Afje'i with the perceptive photography of the man who put it all
together - Shahrokh Golestan. The photographs are a non-literal, philosophical
take on Khayyam — red sunshades of a side-walk café (each Nowruz hold
tulip-fashion a bowl of wine), a long shadow of a passerby (whence is the
entrance and whereto our exit?), the sun's last rays on raindrops (the moon will
wax and wane over and over again)…
How many?
Incidentally, nobody quite knows how many rubais
Khayyam actually wrote. In the oldest extant manuscript, copied 500 years ago in
Shiraz and now held in the Bodleian Library, there are 158. In later versions,
succeeding scribes added more until the total swelled to nearly 1200. Edward
Fitzgerald culled out the essential ones and rendered them in a free English
translation, or as he called it a “transmogrification,” in 1859. He did not
pretend to be too faithful to the original, often combining more than one rubai
to make a brilliant whole that reads as one poem and not as separate
epigrammatic quatrains. Incidentally, there was an Indian connection: his
colleague, Prof. Edward Cowell discovered a Persian manuscript of the rubaiyat
in the Asiatic Society of Calcutta and sent it to him. The resulting book went
almost unnoticed and was soon in the one-penny boxes on the streets until it
found admirers in the poets Rosetti and Swinburne (followed by Hardy, Elliot and
Conan-Doyle) and went on to become one of the most famous, essential and
oft-quoted books for the next 100 years.
In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam was known not as a
poet but as a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. It is difficult to
believe that his most influential work was a treatise that demonstrated the
problems of algebra in which he solved cubic equations through intersecting
conic sections; if you don't understand that, please join the club. He made
far-reaching reforms to the Persian calendar, linking it to actual solar
transit. He was in fact the precursor to non-Euclidian geometry and to a
heliocentric view of the world. In addition, he wrote on mechanics, geography
and jurisprudence.
It is for this work that the man — who has
hundreds of wine-houses named after him — is also commemorated in a lunar crater
on the far side of the moon and in a minor planet — 3095 Omarkhayyam —
discovered in 1980. One can only conclude that his scientific mind and
philosophical bent questioned Divine providence and, finding no answers to the
perplexities, he preferred to focus on the fleeting and sensual pleasures of the
material world. Fitzgerald's rendering of Khayyam's rubaiyat has eclipsed the
other achievements of this remarkable man, at least to the English speaking
world, in a manner best expressed by Khayyam himself: Indeed the idols I have
loved so long/ Have done my credit in mens' eye much wrong; /Have drowned my
honour in a shallow cup/ And sold my reputation for a
song.
Mr Navtej Sarna is a senior diplomat and
writer.
Source:
www.navtejsarna.com
9:34 PM
Sultan Shahin
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