The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Start with the poetry itself. A rubai (plural rubaiyat) is a short poem, comprising a pair of couplets of which the first, second and fourth lines must rhyme. Most Western readers assume, for lack of any reason to the contrary, that "Rubaiyat" is the name of a long poem by Omar Khayyam; but the word itself could easily be translated as "Verses" or "Quatrains." The decision of Edward FitzGerald, who published his translation of the poem in 1859, to leave the title in Persian, can be seen as a deliberate choice emphasizing the "exotic" nature of the original work. Moreover, while hundreds of Omar Khayyam^ rubaiyat have survived, in traditional Persian collections they are simply a large body of short poems, with no overall narra- tive or discursive structure. FitzGerald^ great stroke of genius as a translator was to arrange Omar Khayyam^ verses to pro- duce a long, continuous poem, giving it an aesthetic and philo- sophical weight that was at best only implicit in the original scattered quatrains.

What we have, then, in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald (and retranslated a number of times since, sometimes more accurately but never more pleasingly) is a unique hybrid, a brilliant English poem created from Persian elements. It has evoked for generations of English readers a place that is perhaps more Persian than Pйrsia, an exotic land of wine and roses that existed more for poets than for ordinary folk. FitzGerald^ Rubaiyat of Omar

Khayyam (as opposed to the original collections of Omar Khayyam^ rubaiyat) is, in fact, a prime example of what the Palestinian critic Edward Said has denounced as "Orientalism," the use of art and literature to create an exotic, romantic, and (he claims) fundamentally false image of Asian cultures, substituting European fantasies for real lands where people live and die, prosper and suffer, like anyone else. Said's charge is true to an uncomfortable degree, but it is not the whole story. Complicating the issue is the fact that Persian poets like Omar Khayyam themselves used verse to evoke an exotic, perfumed, mystical realm of the imagination; that qual- ity is preserved, but not created, in translation.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is, I suspect, not much read these days, but almost everyone can still quote from it the lines "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou" (which is not quite accu- rate as a quote from FitzGerald's translation, though close enough). But isn't there something wrong with that picture? One firm principie of Islam is that alcohol is strictly prohibited to believers (see the Koran [24]); so what is Omar Khayyam doing invoking the pleasures of wine? The answer is that Islam (except in the ferocious fundamentalist form that is ali too common in our own time) has generally made allowances for human frailty; alco­hol is prohibited, but some people might nevertheless take a drink—and the fate of their souls is, as always, entirely in the hands of the only and omnipotent God. Indeed in the traditional Islamic world there was a long and tolerant association of wine and poetry; the Ottoman sultans strictly regulated coffee-houses as hotbeds of political dissent, but allowed taverns to open unmo- lested, as the haunts of harmless poets. (There was also a pious fiction that poets might use wine as a metaphor for the intoxica- tion of romantic, or even of divine, love, without actually taking a sip of the stuff themselves.) And so wine and love and roses are used by Omar Khayyam to make a profound statement: that life is indeed full of pleasures, to be enjoyed to the full; but if one loves life, so one should not shrink from death—the one and the other alike are in the hands of God.

The Rubaiyat of Ornar Khayyam is a sort of miracle, a col- laboration between a gifted poet and a brilliant translator, bridging great chasms of time and cultural distance. The Persian mathematician and the Victorian Orientalist have together produced a book of verses that sing as sweetly in our own time as ever.

J.S.M.

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DANTE ALIGHIERI

1265-1321

The Divine Comedy

Like his era, the life of Dante was disordered, but his master- piece is the most ordered long poem in existence. During his lifetime his native Florence, and indeed much of Italy, was divided by factional strife. In this struggle Dante, as propagan- dist and government official, played his part. It was not a suc- cessful part, for in 1302 he was banished. To the day of his death, almost twenty years later, he wandered through the courts and great houses of Italy, eating the bitter bread of exile.