Books: Stuffed Eagle

• Share

THE ORIGINAL RUBAIYYAT OF OMAR KHAYAAM, translated by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah. 86 pages. Doubleday. $5.

Translators of poetry are the John Aldens of literature. They may woo the reader in another's name but, ultimately, they must speak for themselves—with translations that stand up in their own right as good poetry. "A translation must live," wrote Edward FitzGerald, "with a transfusion of one's own worse life if he can't retain the original's better. Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle."

FitzGerald, a mid-Victorian belletrist and amateur Orientalist, carried this principle to an extreme when he translated the 12th century Persian poem The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam. He condensed, combined and reshuffled the stanzas, dropping what did not suit him and pumping in generous transfusions of his own sentimental, post-Darwin fatalism. The result is one of the enduring minor poems of the language—awash with fanciful exoticism, vivid and resonant. But scholars have been scandalized by the liberties that FitzGerald took with the original, and for a century have tried in vain to supplant his version with more literal renderings.

If any present-day writer seems likely to succeed at smashing the "Fitz-Omar cult," it is Robert Graves. At 72, he is established as a leading British poet, an adroit translator and an iconoclastic critic and scholar. He does not read Persian, but worked from an annotated crib prepared for him by Persian Poet Omar Ali-Shah, who claims that the manuscript has been in his family for 800 years. Yet this new Rubaiyyat suffers from Graves's apparent inability to decide whether he was writing more as a translator or as a poet. He may well have failed as both.

After this version was published in England last fall (TIME, Nov. 3), Graves was attacked not only for trying to break the spell of the famed passages ("A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou" became "one mancel loaf, a haunch of mutton and a gourd of wine set for us two alone"), but also for making some scholarly blunders of his own. L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an Orientalist at Edinburgh University, maintained that the manuscript used by Ali-Shah and Graves was "a clumsy forgery." Replied Graves: "Howling nonsense." The quarrel may never be resolved, since Graves's critics have not been permitted to examine Ali-Shah's manuscript. Thus the lay reader can only read Graves's Rubaiyyat as an English poem and decide whether it speaks for itself.

Graves is plain where FitzGerald is prettified, philosophic where FitzGerald is sententious. His austere tone evokes a more troubled, yearning Omar whose tippling is a metaphor for religious mysticism. Yet, surprisingly for a poet of his skill and grace, Graves often lapses into ungainly syntax, primly avoids rhymes, and altogether misses the colorful, melodious murmur that so entrances the ear and emotions in FitzGerald. He may be deliberately exercising his classical restraint or making an overzealous try for accuracy. In any case, he stiffens the flow of the poem. Here is one of FitzGerald's best-known quatrains:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word

of it.