Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Le Gallienne)/To the Reader
To the Reader
I am told that an apology will be expected of me for this humble attempt to add to the poetry of nations. For my part, I believe that poetry should be its own apology, and that in so far as the following paraphrase is poetry, it will need no further justification.
However, as there is another name upon the title-page besides my own, perhaps I owe it to my reverence for Omar Khayyám and Edward FitzGerald to make a few minor explanations.
To plead that the idea of a new verse rendering of Omar Khayyám was not my own unassisted impertinence, is but to hint at the originality of the English publisher, without easing the burden of my responsibility.
As for that very minor matter, my Persian, I would put it to my friends of the Omar Khayyám Club—whether Persian be any 'necessary adjunct or true ornament' of your true Omarian. Indeed, I have a notion,—which, of course, may be quite erroneous—that a knowledge of Persian disqualifies one for membership in that genial society. It would seem a sort of unkindness towards FitzGerald,—as suggesting, what it is the growing fashion to forget, that there ever was any such person as Omar at all.
However, there seems to be no real doubt that there was, and that he has transmitted across some seven hundred years a series of cabalistical ink-stains,—like the markings on flowers,—which Messrs. Nicolas, Whinfield, and McCarthy agree in interpreting as nearly alike as is no matter. Of these rose-leaves 'freakt with jet,' these rubáiyát, these quatrains, Omar's editors count, roughly, some five hundred, many of which are of doubtful authenticity. These in the original manuscripts are subject to an arbitrary alphabetical arrangement which is no arrangement. They are a veritable pot-pourri of wine-stained petals—red, yellow, and white—
. . . maybe
The Saki gathered them that night he went
Across the grass and that sad moon arose.
Probably the original rose of Omar was, so to speak, never a rose at all, but only petals toward the making of a rose; and perhaps FitzGerald did not so much bring Omar's rose to bloom again, as make it bloom for the first time. The petals came from Persia, but it was an English magician who charmed them into a living rose.
Well, out of that hoard of wine-stained rose-leaves, FitzGerald made his wonderful Rose of the Hundred and One Petals—purple rose incomparable for glory and perfume. He had chosen many of the richest petals, but he had left many behind,—and it is chiefly of these that I have made my little yellow rose.
I have persisted in this image because it is really an accurate description of what I conceive to have been FitzGerald's method of dealing with his original, as it describes my own method of manipulating the translations on which the following poem is based. In making my version I have, of course, employed the form of quatrain naturalised by FitzGerald—naturalised, it must be remembered, and not invented; the unrhymed third line being a feature of the original rubá'iy, and the melody of the whole quatrain being accounted by those able to judge a beautiful echo of the old Persian music. There appears to be this difference, however, that the rhymes in the Persian are tri-syllabic, a metrical effect not dignified in English. One slight variation of the accepted form I have occasionally attempted, following what appears to be a trick of emphasis not infrequently employed in the original—the repetition of one emphatic word three times in lieu of rhymes, as in this quatrain:—
Would you seek beauty, seek it underground;
Would you find strength—the strong are underground;
And would you next year seek my love and me,
Who knows but you must seek us—underground?
To Mr. McCarthy's charming prose version I have to express my chief obligation. Those who know it will be able to discover for themselves to what extent I have literally followed, to what extent departed from, and to what extent expanded his prose. I confess to having made the freest use of my own fancy, and a number of the following quatrains have little or no verbal parallel in the original. Such, however, are never, in my judgment, foreign to Omar's manner of thought, but are rather explicit expressions of philosophy implicit in his verses.
The quatrains in celebration of the clay provide a case in point. Omar never tires of pondering the riddle of the dust—
What buried moons of beauty Time hath hid
Deep in earth's dusty bosom from of old;
and my verses but more particularly formulate a mystic materialism which, obviously, is the very heart of his philosophy. À propos the clay, the reader will miss that little book of the pots which is one of the triumphs of FitzGerald's version. Omar gives several hints for that quaint little miracle-play, but the development of them is so much FitzGerald's own that there was no option but to leave the pots alone.
The reader may remark that Omar's pessimism in the following paraphrase is mitigated more frequently by moods of optimism than in FitzGerald. In his attitude to the Deity, the 'he's a good fellow' note is more frequently sounded, a curiously complete and abandoned faith alternating paradoxically with the most savage criticism and despair. In this my paraphrase accords more nearly with the Omar of the more literal translators—for Omar is always ready to curse God with one cup and love Him with the next.
One interest of Omar's existence I may perhaps claim to represent with a more proportionate fulness,—his interest in love and 'women with languorous narcissus eyes.' There are a considerably greater number of verses devoted to that pleasant subject in the original than one would gather from FitzGerald; and though, after Oriental fashion, woman was merely an interlude in Omar's life, a pet, a plaything, there are several quatrains which breathe quite a modern intensity of passion. That Omar sometimes made use of wine and women as symbols of his mystical philosophy is, doubtless, true; but that he more often made a simpler use of them is, happily, still more certain—for Omar was, emphatically, a poet who found his ideal in the real.
As it proved impracticable to give even such random continuity to these love-verses, as I have attempted in the body of the poem, I have made use of them as an intermezzo, a device of arrangement which is appropriate as suggesting the intercalary importance of women in the life of the great thinker-drinker—as though, in some pause of his grave or humourous argument, he should turn to caress the little moon at his side.
WAGGONER'S WELLS, HIND HEAD, SURREY.