Edward FitzGerald (1)Rezensionen

FitzGerald's Rubáiyát = 5⭐

Euphranor is an earlier work taking the form of a Platonic dialogue one day in late spring in Cambridge between a doctor and several young students while they drink beer and play bowls. It's a reply to a popular book of the 1850s on the proper education of English manhood which, little known today, set the tone for a certain kind of Stiff Upper Lipped Englishness that inspired the Scout movement and running towards machine gun fire armed with a stick, and pertains today amongst the Eton Set, Daily Mail readers, and those who still pine for the British Empire. FitzGerald, as far as I can make out, wasn't a fan. The polemic, good natured as it was, I could have done without, but the characters and setting were really appealing, and it's a great loss that FitzGerald never wrote a novel.

Sáláman and Absál is FitzGerald's translation of 14th century Persian Sufi poet, Jámí's, allegory of the soul's enlightenment. That he uses the metaphor of female sexual allure corrupting masculine purity and nobility doesn't read well in the 21st century. It was a bit of a slog, to be honest, but not without some beautiful images, and I learned something of the legend of Alexander's Mirror, which allowed the Great emperor to view far-off lands and communicate with people there, which was interesting. Overall rating 4 ⭐

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If you love poetry, then this is a must-read. Omar Khayyam was absolutely brilliant.
Nevertheless, I could summarize the full Rubaiyat in one line:
Drink more wine. There is no afterlife. Be happy in this life.

But hey, who reads poetry for anything but pleasure, right? It's never in the point.

Another exceptional poem I've heard so much about but have only now read.

A true classic of world literature. This edition has a nice introduction and is wonderfully illustrated.
The moving finger having writ ...

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Persian: رباعیات عمر خیام‎) is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A ruba'i is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubáiyát (derived from the Arabic language root for "four"), meaning "quatrains".

wine is good, I agree

Exquisitely translated by Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyam's deeply personal poetry will beguile your soul. Exploring the themes of death, life, joy, despair, faith and existence; Khayyam draws you into the fabric of Persian philosophy and culture.

My Father used to quote his poetry to me when I was a teen. I enjoyed it then. But I feel and understand it now, that I have experienced life.

I highly recommend this be read at many points in your life. It will illumine your path.

"Irâm indeed is gone with all its Rose,
And Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup where no one knows:
But still the Vine her ancient Ruby yields,
And still a Garden by the Water blows.
- Verse V
The introduction and notes in this edition [9780713604184] are illuminating, and got me doing something I realise I haven't done before: searching the internet for Rubaiyát references. The most interesting thing I learned was that Khayyám's mention of "Irâm" being "gone with all its Rose" is a reference to a lost city, called by T.E. Lawrence the Atlantis of the Sands, and which the Koran mentions as, perhaps, being destroyed for its sins. There have been expeditions to locate Irâm, "The City of the Pillars", and, like Atlantis in the West, many disputed claims for its discovery.
Depleting my store of cultural ignorance is a never-ending, but enriching, task.

This rare copy of the famous poem, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Persia was rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald. Here is the complete edition showing variants in the five original printings. There is no date shown for publication and a guess would be late nineteeneth century.

What magical AABA masculine quatrains! I'm just starting to move into great works of the non-Western canon, and I've been aware of The Rubáiyát for a long time. Now that I've read through it twice, I see why it is an oft-cited great work of literature. The Bodleian Library has produced a gorgeous hardcover, ribbon-bookmarked volume using the English translation of Edward Fitzgerald and the delicate illustrations of René Bull. Amusingly, Omar seems to struggle with a penchant for wine ("the Juice") in light of his religious strictures (cf. quatrain LXI), while at the same time, in a more generalized and universal mode, delivering quatrain after quatrain of sublime profundity (cf. LXXIII) that leaves the Juice a trivial matter in this short life. A majority of the verse has an ironic flare bordering on sardonic absurdity (cf. LXV), but upon subsequent readings of such verses one discovers the depth of their meaning and resonance. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the poem cycle is the allegory of the clay pots.

While I still can’t say that I fully understand or enjoyed the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam this second time around, the experience was much better than my first attempt. This cloth-bound, slipcovered edition was immediately appealing with its bright cover design and integrated illustrations, which I felt complemented and enhanced the poetry contained in the collection. I may have bought the collection to add to my collection of work by illustrator Edmund Dulac (probably the most well-known illustrator of FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat), but there were also other complementary illustrations which showed even more beautifully interpreted scenes from the poem fragments as well as an integrated design aesthetic inspired by traditional Persian and Arabic art styles that worked to further enhance the text. Of course, we’re still dealing with an incomplete poem (FitzGerald seems to have only translated the parts which interest him, leaving out “duplicate” or similar materials, and working from various incomplete manuscripts), but in this edition we’re presented with each stanza visually separated from each other with strong numeric headings. This serves to enhance the individual nature of each carefully constructed verse, and in many cases they can be treated and interpreted on their own, even though they can also be read as part of a larger narrative. This collection may not be my favourite set of poetry due to its choppy narrative nature, but I can see myself dipping back into it to examine specific stanzas for interpretation and inspiration, as some of them are undoubtedly lovely examples of verse.

The description on the back cover of this book claimed that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the most popular and well-thought of poems in translation, but honestly I felt that they vastly over-sold it. The version contained in this particular book didn't seem to be the poem in its entirety, just some fragments collected alongside Dulac's illustrations, which presents a pretty clear problem from the outset, but even those fragments didn't seem particularly readable. Maybe it was Fitzgerald's translation which lost the poetry in the poem, or maybe it's just not a very good poem and was only liked by a certain subjet of the Victorian population who popularized it. At least Dulac's illustrations were lovely, even though I felt like the quality of reproduction muddied the colour tones somewhat. The fragmented nature of the poem did not seem to pair well with the illustrations themselves, but clearly Dulac was very inspired by the Arabian setting and stylings of the culture. Hopefully an enterprising publisher has (or will) reconstitute this collection to either feature the full text or to parse it down to the particular passages which Dulac chose to illustrate.

Would that I had read this sooner, and frequently.

The edition I read was a 1947 one translated by Fitzgerald. I guess this listing is the closest to what I read. See my blog post on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2005/11/booknote-rub225iy225t.html

I feel like this translation was significantly coloured by Colonial perspectives of translator Edward FitzGerald and lacks the truth of the poetry I expected.

When people say a book is difficult to read they normally mean there is something intrinsically challenging about the text. Ulysses is difficult because, well, it's by James Joyce; The Tale of Genji is difficult because there are five hundred characters spanning half a century, and no one has a name. But this edition of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the first book I've read that was difficult to read from a purely mechanical point of view.

After the book's thorough and interesting introduction we come to the reproduction of the original book. FitzGerald didn't want to ruin the text of the poem with footnotes, so uses endnotes, marked out by numeric superscripts. So far so good. Daniel Karlin, this edition's editor, wants to respect FitzGerald's wishes so also omits footnotes and moreover omits any superscripts to inform the reader of the presence of one of his endnotes. So now not only does the reader need to mark three pages simultaneously, the poem, FitzGerald's endnotes, and Karlin's end-endnotes, but also he must keep flicking to the latter of the three in case Karlin has just pointed out something useful. (In fact for the full experience one should mark a fourth set of pages where variants are included for each stanza from the five different editions of FitzGerald's work.)

Having virtually dislocated my fingers after three stanzas in order to keep up with this merry charade I felt obliged to utter a playground epithet pointing out that this style of reading was a poor substitute for a game of soliders. And so I gave up on Karlin's end-endnotes and made do with Fitzgerald's, referring to Karlin's only if something I really didn't understand came up. And then I re-read the poem using Karlin's notes rather than Fitzgerald's. And then I read the variant stanzas, and the intriguing appendices. Suffice it to that once I figured out how to read the book I really did enjoy it.

When people say a book is difficult to read they normally mean there is something intrinsically challenging about the text. Ulysses is difficult because, well, it's by James Joyce; The Tale of Genji is difficult because there are five hundred characters spanning half a century, and no one has a name. But this edition of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the first book I've read that was difficult to read from a purely mechanical point of view.

After the book's thorough and interesting introduction we come to the reproduction of the original book. FitzGerald didn't want to ruin the text of the poem with footnotes, so uses endnotes, marked out by numeric superscripts. So far so good. Daniel Karlin, this edition's editor, wants to respect FitzGerald's wishes so also omits footnotes and moreover omits any superscripts to inform the reader of the presence of one of his endnotes. So now not only does the reader need to mark three pages simultaneously, the poem, FitzGerald's endnotes, and Karlin's end-endnotes, but also he must keep flicking to the latter of the three in case Karlin has just pointed out something useful. (In fact for the full experience one should mark a fourth set of pages where variants are included for each stanza from the five different editions of FitzGerald's work.)

Having virtually dislocated my fingers after three stanzas in order to keep up with this merry charade I felt obliged to utter a playground epithet pointing out that this style of reading was a poor substitute for a game of soliders. And so I gave up on Karlin's end-endnotes and made do with Fitzgerald's, referring to Karlin's only if something I really didn't understand came up. And then I re-read the poem using Karlin's notes rather than Fitzgerald's. And then I read the variant stanzas, and the intriguing appendices. Suffice it to that once I figured out how to read the book I really did enjoy it.

I read the version on iBooks. The first edition is better than the fifth, but more abstract and metaphorical. I liked it a lot. Read the intro, and some of the Wikipedia page to get a sense of it before you dive in; it makes little sense without context.

3 v.

You'd think I'd react with dismay
to these poems, so cliche
but really what's past is so profound
when we look at it today.

I think that it could not be worse
to write reviews in bad verse
but once the joke has got its grip
there's no escape; it is my curse.

Beautifully illustrated in an art deco style in both coloured and b&w line drawings.

This is an odd one. It reminds me of the Book of Ecclesiastes if Solomon had gotten too deep into his cups while writing it. A quick read, though!

I'm not going to rate this Edition because I feel that the illustrations seem to be out of context for the quatrains that they're illustrating. I will find another addition and read it and review it later.

If life is meaningless, why not enjoy its simple pleasures? If Epicurus had read what this Persian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and poet had written, he probably would have approved of it.

Omar Khayyam, through the brilliant English poetic voice that Edward FitzGerald lent him, speaks to us in a way that few are capable of. Realizing how incapable to provide any substantial answers any philosophical attempt is, what else can you conclude than a sort of Epicureanism that takes being alive as everything you will ever get, and that your enjoyments, sparse as they are, should be praised? If you have no metaphysical expectations beyond this life and experiences, Omar will speak directly to you. If you have a different set of beliefs, he might offend you, as he has many others throughout history. In any case, you won't feel indifferent to his thoughts. And thanks to Edward FitzGerald's translation, you will find in the words and their musicality the joys of the wine that Omar repeatedly praises.