In Our Time - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Episode Date: May 22, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1859 the poet Edward FitzGerald published a long poem based on the verses of the 11th-century Persian scholar Omar Khayyam. Not a single copy was sold in the first few months after the work's publication, but after it came to the notice of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood it became enormously influential. Although only loosely based on the original, the Rubaiyat made Khayyam the best-known Eastern poet in the English-speaking world. FitzGerald's version is itself one of the most admired works of Victorian literature, praised and imitated by many later writers.With:Charles Melville Professor of Persian History at the University of CambridgeDaniel Karlin Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of BristolKirstie Blair Professor of English Studies at the University of StirlingProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Awake for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight. And lo, the hunter of the east has caught the Sultan's turret in a noose of light. That rousing standard is the opening of the rubyat of Oma Kaya.

A long poem, which in the first half of the 20th century was arguably the most influential in the English language. It was self-published as a pamphlet in 1859 by the Victorian poet Edward Fitzgerald, and it's based on verses attributed to one of the great thinkers of medieval Persia. But who was Omicayam? And how did a poem which sold not a single copy for the first year of its life become one of most admired works of Victorian literature? With me to discuss the Rubietta Oma-Kayam are Charles Melville, Professor of Persian history at the University of Cambridge

Daniel Carling Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol and Kirsty Blair Professor in English Studies at the University of Sterling Charles Melvin, before we get underwent let's begin with the Persian writer who's working translations will you tell us something about Omar Kayam on the period you lived in Yes, Omar Chayam in his own lifetime

was famous as an astronomer and a mathematician and he didn't really achieve any fame as a poet until very much later. It might help just to say a little bit about when he was born and the period in which he lived. He was born in 1048 in May and he died in 1131, so he had quite a long life. And he was a resident of northeastern Iran, the city of Nishapur. And he lived therefore the whole of his life in a period where Iran was dominated by the Seljuk Turks, who just was starting their invasions of the Eastern Islamic world. And this is important because it's the beginning of a new era, and it explains something

about the social conditions of the time and also the religious, the slight change in religious attitudes of the time as well, because the Seljuks were strongly Sunni Turks, that's Orthodox Sunni Turks, Muslims. and part of their propaganda was to revive Sunni Islam and to overcome the previous period where various different sects and the Shi'is and so on had been dominant. And so there's quite a strong urge toward orthodoxy and a sort of reassertion of Islamic principles,

which means really orthodox principles. And this goes together with a sort of dislike of speculation, I would say, in philosophy, which had always been regarded with some skepticism anyway. And also a growth of Sufi thought, this is, say, mystical thought. So these two things are all part of the background. And he was, as I say, in northeastern Iran, which was rather an engine room for most of these developments. His work as a scientist, I'm not really very able to comment on, but he was famous as a mathematician and for solving different algebraic equations.

And he wrote a very famous treatise on how difficult Euclid's propositions are, which I'm afraid I don't even understand the proposition. But he was clearly right. It's only to do with parallel lines and where they end up. But anyway, he was known in his own time as a very great thinker and as a philosopher. And, of course, the part of this philosophy was sort of materialist or rationalist philosophy, which was becoming completely out of fashion. as the orthodox Islamic traditions

were being very firmly asserted by the ruling elite. Do we know, were there any comments at the time of him as a poet at all? No, none at all. The earliest reference to him, someone met him, and he expressed an interest in some Arabic poetry. That's all. But there's no reference to Chaham himself writing poetry in his own lifetime. But the fame he had as a scientist was considerable, wasn't it?

adjusting the solar calendar. Yes, well this was, apart from these treatises on mathematics and algebra. He was one of a group of astronomers who helped revise the calendar, which in fact is still essentially the solar calendar in use in Iran today. It adjusted the beginning of the new year to what's now called no ruse into March. And this was necessary because the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar. and it hadn't really been revised since the start of the Arab invasions and the beginning of the Islamic period. And so the year had got out of sync with the natural seasons, if you like. And so they readjusted all to do with measuring the real length of the solar year

and getting... And very important in religions for festivals and feasts and that kind of thing. This is one reason why being an astronomer was okay and being a material scientist, as it were, because it was very important for knowing where you were. I mean, sort of physical geography, so you could pray in the right direction for Mecca and for identifying the beginning of the months of fasting

and this sort of thing. So it was a recognised and important science. Okay, Daniel Carl, let's take a deep breath. From the 12th century to the 19th century. And turn our attention to Edward Fitzgerald, one of the two poets in this programme as you were. Would you tell us about his background and early life? Okay, well, Fitzgerald was born,

in 1809. At the time the family name was Purcell. He adopted the name of Fitzgerald later as a result of a legacy from the mother's side of the family. And the Fitzgeralds were immensely wealthy. They were Anglo-Irish landowners. They had estates all over the country.

Fitzgerald's mother was reputed to be the wealthiest woman in England. So he had very privileged, but also in some ways very unhappy childhood and young. manhood. He has a very poignant comment about the nursery

at Bradfield Hall in Suffolk where he was wanting that his mother used to come upstairs to visit the children. We were not much comforted. And his education, he was educated at the grammar school at Barry St Edmonds and then Trinity College Cambridge, and

he was a fine scholar but not in that sense an orthodox one. He was well educated but also self-taught. Most of his knowledge of English literature, for example, didn't come to him from academic sources, but from his own wide reading. The time he was at Cambridge is a good time to be at Cambridge if you were at Perth, wasn't it?

Oh, yes. And he made great friendships. He did. He made very strong friendships, both from school at Barry St Edmonds and at Cambridge that were lifelong friendships. The key figure, of course, is Tennyson, but in fact Fitzgerald didn't know Tennyson at Cambridge, but only a couple of years after he left. but he was at Cambridge

in that time of ferment and literary earnestness which is just as it were beginning the Victorian period the transition from the Regency to the Victorians was taking place and Fitzgerald was at the heart of that The

one or two of the Knights of Aberadsey he was so rich he never had to work at all and yes he had no profession and this seemed to be as if if you're rich you don't write poetry, but rich people are Britain poetry, have now?

I mean, what's to stop them? There's something poignant about Fitzgerald's literary career in that it is, it's not a professional career. He's sometimes described as a man of letters. But if you compare him to someone like Edmund Goss, for example, he never had a job as a writer. And nor was he ever published in that sense. He never had to submit his writing to anyone else's scrutiny.

He self-published. one of the striking features of the Rubayat is that all the nouns are in capital, are capitalized at the start, like an 18th century, an 18th century fashion. And there was no one to correct him, no one to tell him what to do.

He did everything for and by himself. So he's a true kind of eccentric. If you think of the Victorian period as a period of increasing professionalization of literature, Fitzgerald actually stands outside that process. He married once rather unhappily, it seems to be in a bit of a fudge the entire thing. He got into it and then he got out of it. He had a number of close male friends.

The one to concentrate on the moment is Edward Cole, who was a significant Persian scholar and took him in the direction which we're going to be talking about. Can he tell us a little about Cole, then we'll move on? Cowell was the son of a Nipswitch merchant. He was considerably younger than Fitzgerald, but he was an absolutely proficient linguist from early childhood. caught himself Persian at the age of 14 or 15. And Fitzgerald got to know him, and Cowell introduced him first to Spanish and then to Persian.

And Cowell later went on to become the first professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge. But his friendship with Fitzgerald is the reason that we have the Rubayat, because in 1856, Cowell stumbled across the 14th century, 15th century manuscript of the Rubayat attributed to Omar Hayam. and it was a copy of this manuscript that he gave to Fitzgerald when Cowell left for India in 1856. And his departure for India was a devastating blow to Fitzgerald. He pleaded with Cowell not to go, and it was as though he felt himself to be abandoned.

But when Cowell left, he left behind him this extraordinary document, which then became a kind of consolation to Fitzgerald. and it was his intensive study of that manuscript in the light of both of Cowell's abandonment of him and the disastrous marriage that he made. It's to that emotional, intellectual kind of knot that we owe the poem. Kirsty Black, can we step back just a moment?

Eastern literature was already around English letters at the time. English letters and English life. I mean, the East India Company had made an impact and then made a bigger impact. And so on, can you just give a sense? Can you just give us some idea of the writers before Fitzgerald, who had... Orientalism had been a major influence on British poetry for nearly a century before Fitzgerald became interested.

In the mid to late 18th century, this was primarily due to the work of Sir William Jones, famous translator, expert in many languages. He wrote a grammar of the Persian language that was still in use. Fitzgerald was an enormous fan of it, partly because it uses a lot of poetic examples to make the points it brings Persian alive through its literature. But he also translated Persian poetry 1782. He had a famous volume.

And this was read by most of the major romantic figures was a substantial influence in their own poetry. Writers like Coleridge, Baron, Shelley, Lander, Sothe, Thomas Moore were all producing oriental tales. Persian was also, I believe, the official language of the British government in India up until the 1830s. So it was an important language for the civil service and in the kind of growth of the British Empire.

The East India Company's own public school, Halebury, was the language they learnt, wasn't it? So it turned out lots of proper Persian speakers. Yes. And closer to Fitzgerald's time, Tennyson, for example, had been quite influenced by his reading of Sir William Jones. Tennyson's Locksea Hall, 1842, which was one of the most famous poems of the period,

everybody knew it and it's got this very, very distinctive rhythm and Tennyson took that rhythm from Sir William Jones's translations. In fact, later on, Fitzgerald wrote a little note into notes and queries. Someone had said, where did Tennyson's meter in Loxy Hall come from? So Fitzgerald writes in a little cross note saying he took it from the Persian poet, Hafiz. Can we just take on a little bit? A bit of what Daniel was saying about Fitzgerald's first encounter with the work of Oma Cayam. Now, this great friend of his has left, and he is, breathed, they exchanged long, long letters,

which are about how much of his English, but also about the poetry. Can you tell us a bit more how he began to be seriously interested, seriously interested in devoting years of his life to this translation? Well, as Danny said, he encountered it at a difficult moment with the Coils leaving and his marriage. He was working on all through these years that were some of the, probably the hardest years. Fitzgerald would have felt of his life, 1857, 1858. It was really... Hardest because of this split with coal?

Because his closest friends had left, and of course in the period when you moved out to India, there was a strong possibility you might not return. And because he'd given up his cosy bachelor lifestyle and entered on this marriage, which it very quickly became apparent to have been a terrible mistake for both parties. So he was unhappy. He was writing miserable letters. And he said, as Danny mentioned, that Omar offered consolation.

He wrote to Cole, this is December 1857, I take old Omar rather more as my property than yours. He and I are more akin, are we not? You see his beauty, but you can't feel with him in some respects as I do. What he meant was that Cole, who was a very devout Christian, couldn't appreciate the kind of nihilism of some of the poems in the Rubayat, the emphasis on the finality of death and the emphasis on pleasure and seizing the moment

what Fitzgerald saw as a kind of epicurean philosophy. He was primed to be interested in that at this moment in his life. So he started summer of 1856, he first encountered the manuscript. By 1857, he was translating, but he first translated it into Latin, monkish Latin.

he said, perhaps as a way of distancing the unorthodoxy of the sentiments he was finding in the poetry, perhaps as a transnational exercise. He translated medieval Persian into medieval Latin for, it says mind-bending for most of us, but he might have thought that was the easiest way around. Well, of course, highly educated people in the Mede-Victorian period were used to translating into Latin and out of Latin.

That was an exercise that they would have learned at school and college. Charles Melbourne, can you tell us a little more about the originals as far as we know that Vichel was working with? This is an enormous specs problem. As we all know, there's a huge question mark over whether he ever actually wrote a single rabbi. Rubai is one quatrain. One is a four, it's a quatrain. So do you write one or seven hundred? I suppose for the purpose of our discussion, we have to assume that he wrote the rabis that Fitzgerald translated.

well we mentioned earlier that this isn't attested in his own lifetime. But the Rubai'i form was already there. I mean, it was quite a popular form. And it's important to remember that it was a sort of indigenous form. It probably rises out of folk recitation. Most of Persian poetry at this time was going into a very formal direction. They were taking on the meters, the formal meters of Arabic poetry, the Scantian, which gave us a fairly rigid scheme.

were different meters, but I mean there was a scheme. And the Rubei and the Masnavi form, which is also a rather famous Persian epic form, this was a Persian one. And so it reflected better Persian diction, Persian rhythms of the language. And grown out of a native tradition, it didn't have this rather rigid, scantion system imposed on it. So the Rubai form is already well known, and there are various examples that are given of, earlier poets. But they're the sort of thing you can chuck out at a party

and that's probably the context in which they originated. And this is really the problem with identification. You could say it's like a limerick. You can more or less make one up for a nice occasion. And of course all these courtiers and Hayam was at court, even though he was a scientist. He wasn't one of the poets necessarily. But you'd often be expected to come up with something.

So in other words, the poetic background, apart from all the official court poets who are writing their panegyrics and their odes in praise of the sultan and his glorious achievements, there'd be some more lighthearted things where, you know, say something about this or say something about that. And so it's perfectly possible being an educated person that he would have said some things, and it's possible that other people said things that were later attributed to him. I think listeners are rushing in with the question. Why did somebody discover something called the rhubat of Bromacam in the 15th century? He had to

done it. Ah, well, it's before the 15th century. Yeah, but there was a copy made in the 15th century. I was just told earlier in this program, the one or three. So what are they calling it that for if he hadn't done it? Well, it is a difficult problem. There are some early attributions to Chai Am, two or three. I mean, literally two or three by about...

Well, we know we're in an age where two or three is pretty good going for the time. Yes, it's an assumption. You see, the thing is, once you say... this famous person wrote one rabbi then it doesn't take much to say oh he wrote this one and that one i think it's a process of accretion it's actually well known in manuscript um scholarship that once a small cluster of poems of a certain kind is attributed to a certain person then you have a compiler of a manuscript and he's got a lot of anonymous um little poems and he thinks oh this is a poem expressing philosophical skepticism, that's Omar Khayyam.

So as the centuries progress by a kind of natural process of accretion, more and more of these poems get attributed to Khayyam. And of course, nobody can, it's difficult to prove a negative. You can't see, didn't do them. I think what I would also say is that at the time that Fitzgerald was working with the manuscript, he was also working with what for that day was the cutting edge scholarship. It was, as far as he knew. I mean, he knew perfectly well that some of the quatrains that he was working with couldn't be by Chayyam.

He actually discusses this with Cal. So a certain amount of filtering is going on. But as far as the best kind of scholarship of the day was concerned, there was a reasonably large number of these poems that could be attributed to this figure. So we're going on with the assumption that he did it or a lot of it or enough of it to get us through the rest of the program. Yes. Okay, right, fine.

He did. Could I just say the earliest specific reference to Chaiam having, I mean, Rubai associated with Chiam's name is 1203, so that's 60 years after he died roughly. Which is feasible, isn't it? It's a easy reach of marriage. The trouble is it's in a polemic situation where a leading theologian says that Chaham was a great scholar and so on and a great scientist, but unfortunately he was a heretic and listened to.

of this poem he wrote which proves it. Ah, well, that might be more proof. If they were quoting poems that he wrote as a heretic, that must have meant he'd have to force it twice through. It's associating him with this, the whole philosophy. We're going to say that it's a 12th century poem, we're going to give it to him,

give him the benefit of 700 doubts. And what happened then was the sort of Borges rule, that sometimes the translation can be a better poem or more famous than the original poem So they seem to merge into one poem, one man, as it were, Kirstie, Kastik.

Can you just tell us how he made the Rubayat reflect his views, or how he did reflect his views? Materialism has been mentioned and so on. Well, one of the major things I would see in the Rubayat is a reflection of a lot of mid-century anxiety about religion. Of course, we see the Victorian period, and especially around these years is traditionally the great age of faith and doubt. If Fitzgerald had published this poem under his own name set in England,

we would be reading it as one of the major texts about doubt in the period. It's because it's presented as a translation that he's able to get away with saying things that are quite extraordinarily unorthodox for the period, make the most of what we yet may spend before we, too, into the dust descend. that's a quotation. Of course, that's in the book of common prayer, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But in the book of common prayer, it goes on, ensure and certain hope of the resurrection. In the Rubayat, we're left in the dust again and again throughout the poem. Fitzgerald, I'm sorry, Charles.

Can you just a second? Hold on. Can you just finish this now? I come to your truck. Well, Fitzgerald was of his time in attending church outwardly conforming, but he had taken on board the developments. in science, geology. Of course, 1859 is the year when on the origin of the species is published. And he was also very interested in debates going on over biblical translation, whether the Bible could be read literally or not. It's fascinating to me on several occasions in his letters. He compares his method of translation to biblical translation. That's very tongue-in-cheek. He's saying my translation is in no way literal or accurate. It's just like the Bible. But to say that in the 1850s, even in a private letter, he knows how scandalous it is.

Charles. I only really just wanted to say very quickly that, of course, this was exactly one of the reasons why Omar Hayam was considered a heretic in the Islamic context because the belief in the afterlife is absolutely essential. And so this idea that you just come and go through the caravan, Sarai, and that's the end of it all. I mean, as you say, that was really all. It was linking the orthodoxy of Christianity. in the Victorian period with the sort of orthodoxy of Islam in the 11th and 12th century as well. Sorry, can I come to you for a moment? Can you give us, can we try to key down the relationship between the original and the translation? Well, the major innovation that Fitzgerald introduced in the translation method was formal, structural in the sense that he created a single long poem, a kind of

narrative that takes you from dawn, your first quotation indicates to the evening. It's a day, the day of life. Whereas I'm right, aren't I just saying that in the original Persian quatrains are isolated and in fact they're organized in a Persian poetry collection is organized alphabetically by end rhyme. So what Fitzgerald did was to take these quatrains and string them together. He calls them, he tessellated them, is his phrase, into what he called an echelog in a Persian garden. It's a deliberate

classical reference. So he not only Englishes the poem, if I can put it like that, but he also classicizes it in certain respects, both formally and thematically. And he actually took lines from different quatrains in the manuscript

and mashed them together. So it's a very and his rationale for this is expressed in a famous dictum about translation. Better a live sparrow than a dead eagle. That's his idea. What he said is the poem has to live at whatever cost. So that was his method, really, was to bring life to the poem

rather than to leave it as a kind of dead literal translation. We've heard from Cursus, from Cursed Charles Melbourne, about Melville, about how he brought English quotations into it. It's a media surprise, really, Tom. I am to know that he was quoting from the book of Common Prayer and from Shakespeare, from as you like it, but there he was it, the way these poets have. Anyway, he did that.

But can you tell us a little more accurately about the form? And give us an example. The Persian Rubai, as we said, is a quatrain. That could be four separate lines, or it could be taken as two groups of two half-lines. And there are two different rhyme schemes, and there is a theory that the rhyme scheme where every line or half line ends with the same syllable is the same.

In other words, all four are the same. Or it can be more like a limerick where you have the first two and then one separate and then the fourth line goes back. I've got an example of each and these are both from the earliest known ones. I'm afraid I've got a horrible English accent. But the first one is, Dadae rei, that armadano aftani mast, Ura na bidao yat,

Naniharyat pay d'ast Kass me nazanad dami Dā'a'en alam rast K'in'amadan as kujar or raftan be kujas So each of those ends in arst Well, two of you got it, but can you just

What my saying? In this circle in which our coming and going, in which is our coming and going, it has no proper beginning and there's no proper end. So he's basically saying life just is a continuation. Nobody has said a true word in this world about where we come,

this coming, where do we come from and where are we going to? So that's one of the very first ones, this is sight says, and as I say, that's got A-A-A-A-A-A, the rhyme scheme. And if you can bear another one, I've got the other one which shows A-A-A-B-A. Dar-A-Ram-A-Rast, as Bacherich-E-U-Kand-Mal-Kast. Garnik Ahmad she castan as Bechre Cheboud.

There varnik na'amad, I bkerast. So that's arst, ast, bud, asked. And that is the creator, since he adorned everything, why did he break it up? If it was good, what was the point of breaking it? And if it wasn't good, who's fault that? So this is the ageless, endless question.

Daniel Kahn has to come in. The first of those quatrains, you might be interested to know, this is what it becomes in Fitzgerald's poem. It's Quattrain 29 in the first edition. Into this universe and why not knowing, nor wence like water,

willy-nilly flowing, and out of it as wind along the waste, I know not wither, willy-nilly blowing. So, and that has the, the it's the sentiment of the first quatrain but it's the rhyme scheme of the second.

It goes A, A, B, A. Very unusual. That's a remarkable formal innovation that he brought to the stanza. Can you give us an example? I'm still reading from the Persian, but still, can you first it? Can you get in English? It's lovely to hear the Persian.

Well, it would be lovely if it was a Racial Saitabai in Iran in it. Yeah, the ABA rhyme scheme that we're talking about. The point about that is it's very unusual in English verse. Here's a quadrant, this is 63, and it's in a famous section in which the pots in a potter shop are talking about how they were made. After silence spake, a vessel of a more ungainly make,

they sneer at me for leaning all awry. What did the hand then of the potter shake? Obviously, I picked this one, because it's got that lovely line, they sneer at me for leaning all awry, and that is where there's no rhyme. So a rye, it is a bit off, it's slant. You expect a rhyme to come, but it's not there. We're primed in looking at English quadrants to think about ABAB or AAB, or especially if you were looking at a book-length poem,

Quotrains in 1859, the poem in your mind is Tennyson's in Memorium with his famous A-B-B-B-A rhythm. So this throws us off. why is this line shooting out and not finding a match? Fitzgerald says in the introduction that it's like a wave, the wave pauses and then it crashes down in the final line.

What did the hand then of the potter's cheek? Because this stanza is about how can God have created things that are imperfect? Is he incompetent? Is he not paying attention to the job? And as many critics have noted this particular stanza could also reflect on Fitzgerald's process in the work that these stanzas

look a bit imperfect or sound a bit imperfect to the English year, but they are very carefully constructed to create that little ungainliness or that lack of security and clarity in the rhyme that's part of the sort of offbeat and slightly dangerous things

that the poem is trying to say in its period. Daniel Collins, I've mentioned very briefly references which are clearly at the Book of Common Prairie and Shakespeare. and he's leaning quite a bit, and has been alluded to by Kirstie, leaning quite a bit on Tennyson and perhaps Grazellogy. Can you briskly say how he's managed to infuse that into this work? Well, he does it by bringing what he called an English music into the poem.

Tolerable English music was his phrase for it. And he does it by quotation and allusion phrases that people will either recognize, or half-recognise. And it is, as you said, it is as though Omer Umar Hayam, without realizing it is quoting Chaucer and Shakespeare and so on. And what that does,

it lends to the Persian poem power and beauty that are already there in the English. But it does it with a kind of wonderful generosity. It's as though Fitzgerald is gifting to this Persian poem all the resources of the English language. to bring out its beauty.

Charles Marble, what would you say is the main theme of the original poem, as written by Fitzgerald now? We're talking about the Fitzgerald poem. The Fitzgerald poems. Well, they've become one, haven't they? Who's who? Well, they have really.

I suppose one of the main themes we touched on already, this idea of, well, it's not the pointless list of life necessarily, but not knowing what you're there for and where you've come and where you've come, and where you're going to. And the whole questioning, I mean, this is a philosophical questioning. And this is a very important part of it, clearly, and this is obviously what resonated with Fitzgerald himself.

The idea that life is very fleeting. The dust to dust, ashes to ashes, idea is very, very pronounced. I mean, we constantly get the idea that the human vessel is made of clay. Clay, of course, is just earth. It goes back to the earth. and the whole sequence of images about the potter making the vessel out of earth. There's some beautiful bits of homes about,

you know, be careful how you tread on the bank of this lush meadow or whatever because the earth underneath it or it's sprouting up from the body of a dead beauty or someone like this. So there's a sense of return, but it's a cycle of death and decay and a rebirth without any real meaning. the moving, I suppose every British girl

The moving finger rights Yeah and having writ moves on I did actually write that down Having writ moves on And this actually is transformed into one of his poems I know I ought to say this by heart The moving finger rights and having writ moves on Nor all thy piety nor wit

Shall leave it back to cancel half a line Nor all thy tears Wash out a word of it That's to say our fate is predestined really And of course this picks up the whole Belchazzo's feet because this right comes in the moving finger on the wall. There are two aspects to the poem, and they're interconnected. And one of them is to do with pleasure.

So one of the verses that became most famous is Stanser 11 in the first edition, here with a loaf of bread, beneath the bow, a flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness, and wilderness is paradise in now. And the pleasure and the hedonism struck a real chord, didn't it? Oh, yes. It came in, it would be satisfied an idea that somehow the Oriental life and Oriental life was sensuous and almost decanted in the way that we, the British, and the Empire, marching out in our hands, were not. It was a great allure.

It was taken up. This poem was taken up first properly. I mean, it really did not sell a copy in the year, which is unimaginable. That bookseller put him in a box outside at a penny each one picked up by accident by the pre-Rapelite. literally picked it up, and we can say literally properly here, picked it up, paid a penny, next day they came back, it was tough, and it was outrageous, that's when the inflation that had gone on, and

they spread it, they spread it, but it's fitted in with their idea of let's be sensual, let's find colours that are rich, and let's find, and that sort of thing. Kirsty, do you want to go on? Daniel, do you want to go out? Well, what's so striking about that is that it's, that's where the theme of pleasure and the philosophical theme have to be, my view,

seen as absolutely connected. What happened with the reception of the poem, is a wonderfully in a way creatively lopsided view so that all that stuff about pleasure and seizing the moment and Carpe Diem got taken up and the bleakness of the poem got left behind in a way so that stanza 33 which is, I'm afraid, my own sort of favorite stanza,

this is the question that the Omar Hayam is asking heaven, then to the rolling heaven itself, I cried, asking what lamp? had destiny to guide her little children stumbling in the dark and a blind understanding, heaven replied. And there's a good example of what Kirsty is talking about about the way her little children stumbling in the dark where that third unrhymed line is a stumbling line.

There's two things, the flask of wine, the loaf of bread, the beloved in the wilderness, and the blind understanding are part of the same feeling, not a not separable. This was, of course, recognised at the time, one of the reviews that Danny includes in his edition, one of the very few early reviews says, never was the gospel of despair preached more fervently.

And Fitzgerald himself saw it as a depressing poem. But what I like about it, and of course what readers enjoyed is that it's also very funny and charming and witty, its themes of drink and pleasure and gardens. But even in the language, I mean, Danny, you know, we've been talking about the illusions, the richness of English literature, but it also borrows so much from colloquial phrases,

idioms like the willy-nilly Danny mentioned earlier yeah and Wesson from the Tower of Darkness cries fools your reward is neither here nor there 24 and what that's saying is you know in this sort of orientalist image you won't get your reward

today on earth nor tomorrow in heaven but by using the idiomatic neither here nor there Fitzgerald is kind of shrugging well actually why should you care about why should we even be thinking in terms of reward let's talk about the influence it is there's It's rather extraordinary,

being in a cardboard box and offered for a penny each and somebody strode by, picked it up, showed it to Pre-Raphaelites and away, so went and then it became, I have to rush a bit here, because I haven't got as much sound as it. Went among the pre-Raphylites,

and it went to Browning got hold of it, Ruskin got hold of it, and went to America, as even, so having been ignored, rejected and despised, it became one of the most popular poems at the time, Nearly every line of it was quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Cotations

before you knew where you were, so I've told me the notes of one of you. And can you describe, can you say something about Charles, first of all, why you think that happened in the space we're talking about 30 years, 30, 40 years? Well, in England, I think for the reasons that have already been mentioned, I mean, there's this very strong orientalist engagement with India and the East that was very current in the late 19th century. I mean, it was a great jewel in the crown of the empire and all this and that. And then I think this whole fantasy about the harem which comes in.

And of course, the beloved is almost certainly a boy in this poetry. And we get all these crazy illustrations with these half-naked girls founcing around or sitting there draping themselves over a philosopher. He's trying to get on with his work and she's sort of dribbling around all over them with glasses of wine. I mean, this is complete fantasy language, really. It's not really there in the original at all in the Persian. And he wouldn't let it. it be in the illustrations while he's alive.

He wouldn't let it go. No, it wasn't the first illustration, I think, was 1880s. So it was after. And so, I mean, I think all these things come together. It's a mixture of Victorian frustration, perhaps, and this allure of the East, the idea of eat, drink and be merry on the one hand being a

way to get over the disappointments of that. It's not a hundred miles away from that, an duration of Greek and the Socrates and and the drinking, the young man. There's a little alliance going on there, isn't. Yes, I think it's something the English are very susceptible to,

but it's not just the English, of course. I mean, it has a massive influence all over the world. I think that the appeal of the poem after Fitzgerald's death, I mean, it's quite important to say that while he was alive, he did not collude in or try himself to promote the poem in that way. On the contrary, everything he could, to restrict its circulation. and walking north of in Wellington's in the head of cap.

Slaming the door of his cottage in the Parsons face is a famous anecdote and dressing like a tramp and so on. And he actually objected even when Bernard Quarage, the publisher, wanted to put little page decorations, a little oriental border

around the pages. He called it Quorich's Cockney ornament. So the idea of an illustrated edition, particularly with hurries and would have horrified him. Absolutely horrible. provide him. Can we, so it went into this immense

favour, didn't it? It was quoted all over the place. It really dominated the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. In America became even more popular, taken up, TSA, etc. influenced him when he started to read Purchase, beginning and so on. And then it fell from favour

quite dramatically around around 1950-ish Kirstie. Can you tell us why you think that happened? Partly simply because it had become such a populist text. It had come to stand for a sort of popular culture, orientalism.

There were lots of advertising and films and mass market paperbacks, borrowing from the language of the poem and so forth. So amongst writers like Elliot and Pound, both of whom were deeply influenced by this poem

and used it in their work, it was something that they'd read in their younger days, that when they grew up they were slightly skeptical about in the way that any text, any piece of music, anything that seems radical, you know, to start with and exciting,

by the time everybody has it on their bookshelves and everybody knows it and is citing it, it's something that the next generation might want to react against rather than work with? I'm very sorry. Sorry, I'm trapped at you. Is there anything intrinsic in it that meant that people saw as it were through it? Look, it really isn't good enough.

And so as the canon develops, oh gosh, I'm being given. So is there any chance of it being revived at all, do you think? Well, I hope so, but in order to do that, it seems to me there is a kind of hard shell around it and you have to break through the shell. You have to break through the poem you think it is to the poem that is there underneath. And that shell has been made, really, of several generations of writers and readers, thinking before they start the poem

that they know what it's going to be. It's just going to be a kind of slack orientalist fantasy. And if you approach the poem in that way, you're just not going to get it, really. But if you break through that shell, it really is alive underneath. A live spot. Well, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you, Kirsty Blair, Charles Melville, and Daniel Carling. Next week, we'll be talking about the Talmud. It's the written version of the Jewish oral law. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I do. I love hearing the quatrains read in Persian.

Yeah, that was a good bit. That was good for me. I'd like to have done it better. But, I mean, they are. It is actually very nice in person. The one thing we didn't cover, which has always been interested to me, is the reverse, it's like a kind of reverse engineering effect.

am I right in saying that the Iranians now take O'Mahar more seriously than they ever would have had this particular kind of... Well, it is one of these extraordinary things, you know, that in a way, in his own time, he was known as a scientist. And then I don't think that knowledge was ever lost, but his contribution to mathematics and so on was lost. And like so many things, this is a modern product anyway, so on, discovered some of the treaties in manuscripts in Arabic of his algebraic solutions to formulae and so on,

and equations, cubic equations and so on. And suddenly his reputation as a scientist was recovered. But of course, for the common people, I mean, you can't even explain what he's done in these algebraic things. So, I mean, they've no, they've none of this, none of this, none of this, nonsense about whether he wrote one or seven hundred back in Iran. In the 15th century, he is the author of the great poems and that's it. I'm not sure that's right

because I think I'm right in saying that it's a recent Persian scholar who sort of that there is the most rigorous kind of analysis gives you like a handful, maybe about 20 or

30 poems that you could say it's possible he might have written and everything else is But the trouble is so little to go on. Without the manuscript evidence, that's basically the problem. My point of view, from looking at it through Fitzgerald's eyes, he would have thought that there was a solid, authentic core of texts.

Well, has been Gerald given it, do you think Fitzgerald's voice has given it one voice, or do you think inside it, inside those quatrains, there is a consistent voice? because one of the things about this first translation is that he has a consistent voice going through it. So you think, yeah, this is by one person.

This is what you're saying about, they're giving it to shape. That's what you're saying. That's Fitzgerald's not. The first edition is 75 quadrants. He had two, he was working with, we didn't mention the second manuscript when Carl went to Calcutta. He was professor of history at the presidency college

and he actually, he was really sweet. He went to the library of the Bengal Asiatic Institute. And he actually found another Omar Hayam manuscript, which was later and had been done in India. And that had over 400 quadrants. And he sent that... And it was called the Omar Hayam manuscript.

It was the Calcutta. It was the Calcutta. The Bodley one is referred to as the Usley manuscript because it was Sir William Usley was the diplomat who brought it back. And then there's the Calcutta manuscript. And when... And they overlap, but there's... also a lot of stuff in the Calcutta manuscript that's not in the Usley Manus. Fitzgerald's looking at this stuff and he knows that some of it is likely to be interpolated and kind of inauthentic. But he also has what he thinks are just good grounds for believing that there's enough evidence to give you, I don't know what he would have, whether he would even have put a figure on it, but maybe two, three hundred.

But would you, when you're talking to your students nowadays, would you encourage you. to read this and would you say you can get a lot out of it or would you say this is the sort of under-tow of Darwinism and second rank tennis and how would you do you bring it into play? It's interesting

I was thinking about this actually because I was thinking I've never taught this poem and if you had a basic introduction to Victorian poetry course I don't know what Danny thinks but it often wouldn't be there. Partly because of the difficulty of authorship I think it's a bit alarming. I mean it's alarming for me not knowing the person it's not

students go. Are you talking about something, Fitzgerald said, are you talking about something from the original Persian? Are we looking at a translation or a new poem or weird hybrid? Can't you accept the bogus? Academics? This is really interesting to discuss. Can you accept the idea that actually one poet can absorb another

and the two of them can become one poet? Yes. It's a great English poem. Tom Morris has just entered in the room, which signals tea and coffee. And if you're lucky, I don't know if you're going to be lucky, you might get a bit of bread. but certainly you only got a jug of wine.

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