Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam

Fitzgerald brought the artistry of a demiurge to raw material supplied by Omar. In the Persian manuscripts Fitzgerald consulted, Omar’s Rubáiyát (quatrains) are arranged alphabetically, the sequence determined by the last letter of the rhyme word. 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 Bernard Quaritch, his first 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 eschewed a literal translation. He imaginatively rendered, to use his own word, Omar’s thoughts into the idioms of English, sometimes creating his own metaphors, imagery, and allusions. Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced Fitzgerald to American readers, said that “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 surmised “that the beauties of Omar are largely due to the genius of the translator.” While many have translated Omar’s verse, all seem poetasters beside Fitzgerald. George Roe, a Persian scholar, 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 yea Few poems have been as widely esteemed by both literati and ordinary readers.