Call Me Pisher
How I wish I could lay claim to “Call me Ishmael” but apart from the fact that a much greater man owns that one, I have done nothing in my so far brief sojourn on this planet to justify that appellation. However, put aside Mr. Melville for now and think Fitzgerald and Longfellow.
I refuse to accept runner-up prizes for appreciation of great fiction but I confess to being little better than a buffoon when it comes to poetry. Despite its lack of adulation from literary critics, I adore Song of Hiawatha. I think its trochaic tetrameter rhythm that so turns me on is what turns the critics off. DUM da, DUM da, DUM da, DUM da. How do you improve on this?
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, etcetera, etc. etc. You call that sing-song; I call it great. Billy Shakespeare (the first one, the Bard of Avon), imitated Longfellow in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, but just didn’t have the right stuff.
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Enough of digressions. It is Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat that I want to explore this fine Saturday morning. Although there are at least 1000 translations of this poem into several dozen languages, none dares to criticize it in any of its versions. And you can bet your bottom dollar i won’t either. I have hung around the world of philosophy for 60 and a 1/2 years and perhaps only Plato’s works match its beauty (though I doubt that) and probably no more than a couple of dozen treatises surpass its philosophical depth.
The translation we Americans know best is that of Edward Fitzgerald. It is one of the very few translations that equal the original in Persian. In truth, I take that on faith since I don’t know a word of Persian. When I say “translation” I am ignoring the fact that Fitz did five of them over a period of 30 years. So far as I can tell, the differences are minuscule. The most famous of the quatrains are these:
Edition One:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
In the fifth edition, this becomes:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
I am damned if I understand the reason for the change but, then, I am no Fitzgerald.
A hundred or so years later, Peter Avery put that stanza this way:
I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,
Half a loaf for a bite to eat,
Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,
Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.
I don’t get it. I’ll take Fitz any day of the week but, then, I’m no Peter Avery. A Persian, too, has taken a whack at translating it in to English:
Ah, would there were a loaf of bread as fare,
A joint of lamb, a jug of vintage rare,
And you and I in wilderness encamped—
No Sultan’s pleasure could with ours compare.
It seems nobody is is interested in a literal translation and that may be because, as is often said, poetry is not really translatable. Fitz himself put down his own work as transmogrification. Whatever.
As for the philosophy, there are at least two schools of thought: One claims that he was highly influenced by Islamic mysticism, and particularly sufism, and his references to wine and lovers are allegorical representations of the mystical wine and divine love. A second school of thought refutes the first completely, claiming that Khayyam understood his mortality and inability to look beyond, and his references to wine and lovers are very literal and sensual.
Who knows? Pishers don’t. For more on this, see http://www.okonlife.com/life/philosophy.htm
. In the meantime, while you ponder this, do as my waiters and waitresses always advise me: ENJOY!
