Chapter Three

Edward Fitzgerald and Synopsis of his “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”

Edward FitzGerald was born in 1809 at the White House between Woodbridge and

Bradfield village, about seven miles north-east of Ipswich. He was the 7th of the 8 childres of

John Purcell and Mary Frances Fitzgerald. After the death of John Fitzgerald (Father of Mary

and Father in Law of John) in 1818, John Purcell assumes the name and arms of his wife's

family, the FitzGeralds,

The change of family name occurred shortly after FitzGerald's mother inherited her

second fortune. She had previously inherited over half a million pounds from an aunt, but in

1818, her father died and left her considerably more than that. The FitzGeralds were one of

the wealthiest families in England. Both the families of Purcell and FitzGerald were Anglo-

Norman descent.

In 1816, the family moved to France, and lived in St Germain as well as Paris, but in

1818, after the death of his maternal grandfather, the family had to return to England. In

1821, Edward was sent to King Edward VI School, Bury St Edmunds. In 1826, he went on

to Trinity College, Cambridge.  He became acquainted with William Makepeace

Thackeray and William Hepworth Thompson. Though he had many friends who were

members of the Cambridge Apostles, most notably Alfred Tennyson, FitzGerald himself was

never offered an invitation to this famous group. In 1830, FitzGerald left for Paris, but in

1831 was living in a farmhouse on the battlefield of Naseby.

Needing no employment, FitzGerald moved to his native Suffolk, where he lived

quietly, never leaving the county for more than a week or two while he resided there. Until

1835, the FitzGeralds lived in Wherstead, then moved until 1853 to a cottage in the grounds
of Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, to which his parents had moved. In 1860, he again moved

with his family to Farlingay Hall, where they stayed until in 1873. Their final move was to

Woodbridge itself, where FitzGerald resided at his own house close by, called Little Grange.

During most of this time, FitzGerald was preoccupied with flowers, music and literature.

Friends like Tennyson and Thackeray had surpassed him in the field of literature, and for a

long time FitzGerald showed no intention of emulating their literary success. In 1851, he

published his first book, Euphranor, a Platonic dialogue, born of memories of the old happy

life in Cambridge. This was followed in 1852 by the publication of Polonius, a collection of

"saws and modern instances," some of them his own, the rest borrowed from the less familiar

English classics. FitzGerald began the study of Spanish poetry in 1850 at Elmsett, followed

by Persian literature at the University of Oxford with Professor Edward Byles Cowell in

1853.

FitzGerald married Lucy, daughter of his late friend the Quaker poet Bernard Barton,

in Chichester in 1856, after a death-bed promise to Bernard made in 1849 to look after her.

The marriage was unhappy and they were totally unsuited to each other and the couple

separated after only a few months. In 1856 Cowell discovered The Rubaiyat of Omar

Khayyam in a Persian manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and made a transcript

for FitzGerald the he started to translate it in English and published the first edition in 1859.

During his last years he was engaged on 3 works he left unfinished. The first one was a

selection of Dryden’s prefaces; the second a dictionary of Madame de Sevigne’s Letters

which was eventually completed by his great niece in 1914; the third was a biography of

Charles Lamb. In spite of gradually failing health, his mode of life did not change much, and

he kept up his numerous friendships by personal contact and by correspondence, to the very

end. His claim to a permanent place in English literature rests, perhaps, as much on his letters
as on his translation of the Rubaiyat. He died while on a visit to George Crabbe (junior)

Rector of Merton, in 1883, and was buried in the churchyard at Boulge.

Fitzgerald’s translation of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is a series of

disconnected verses (quatrains) dwelling on an intermixture of themes such as: a) the

profound sadness of life in that it is bound to end & that (to the poet) nothingness lies beyond

it, this sadness being relieved (& at the same time made deeper!) by the happiness/ joy/

pleasure in wine, women, love, beauty, poetry, song; b) the foolishness (again, as the poet

sees it) of humans striving for anything beyond the things last-mentioned; c) the sadness that

humans can know so little, or none, of the whys and wherefores of this world; d) the futility

of humans hoping in the afterlife and in gods.

 The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the work of two authors, Omar Khayyam and

Edward FitzGerald. Khayyam wrote quatrains in his native Iranian language, Farsi. Each

quatrain, though consisting of only four lines, stood alone as a separate work, usually an

epigram or a special insight. FitzGerald translated many of Khayyam's quatrains and he also

added his own insights and couched the quatrains in his own style. Some critics maintain that

the poetic quality of FitzGerald's finished product exceeded that of Khayyam's original

quatrains. In other words, Khayyam supplied the lumber, and FitzGerald built the house. In

1869, scholar and critic Charles Eliot Norton wrote in The North American Review that

the Rubaiyat “is the work of a poet inspired by the work of a poet; not a copy, but a

reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration.”() In the same

article, Norton, who himself was a translator of foreign-language literary works, wrote that,

“There is probably nothing in the mass of English translations or reproductions of the poetry

of the East to be compared with this little volume, the Rubaiyat in point of value as English

poetry.”() In the strength of rhythmical structure, in force of expression, in musical

modulation, and in mastery of language, the external character of the verse corresponds with

the still rarer qualities of imagination and of spiritual discernment which it displays.

The poet takes the posture of the melancholic, basically cynical, hedonistic, somehow

spiritual, sufistic, mystic, and sensual in some ways. The spirit underlying the poem could

perhaps be rendered by the sayings ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ and – more earthily &

incompletely – ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ But these attitudes, though

they may be regarded as those of a melancholic juvenile, and as being self-indulgent, lacking

in values & attitudes that have made humanity great and admirable, such as courage,

discipline, determination, striving for progress and excellence, meeting the challenge thrown

to the intellect of understanding things and ideas to the limit of the human mind, both for the

joy derived from such understanding and for the use of it for the greater happiness of the race

are expressed in verses so appealing in their poetic texture and tone, their musicality, images,

sensual associations, and feeling, that Fitzgerald’s work is truly a poetic masterpiece. In sum,

the attitudes expressed in Fitzgerald’s work may be said to be fatalistic, hedonistic,

melancholic and pleasured in such melancholy, defeatist, opposed to Christianity and the

ideals of Greco-Roman culture and therefore to the substrate of the scientific & cultural

character of the West, in particular its aspiration to attain learning and understanding of all

things, if possible, for the intrinsic human, individual value of such learning and

understanding (sense of intellectual achievement, pleasure of deepened knowledge &

understanding) and for their use in the betterment of human life & the attainment of

envisioned great possibilities open to humankind in the open-ended future. But the poetry in

it, in its nature as poetry of very limited scope belongs to the pinnacle of human aesthetic

achievement in the written word. I think the above explanation of the spirit of the entire

"Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" translated by Edward Fitzgerald adequately elucidates the

meaning - in Fitzgerald's view - of the quatrain.

 The original manuscript by Omar Khayyam is thought to have comprised at least

seven hundred and fifty and possibly many more quatrains. These were never intended to

represent a continuous work or story. Each quatrain is a separate poem, the epigrammatic

expression of a single thought about such subjects as would occur to the mind of a Persian

poet-philosopher, and, moreover, one skilled in mathematics and astronomy. The Rubaiyat

are the expression of Omar’s own life, the fruits of his own experience, and they were not

written for publication. FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was published

anonymously in 1859 and proceeded to do absolutely nothing to extend the knowledge of the

Persian poet beyond his own time and place.

What FitzGerald did with Khayyam’s medieval verse went far beyond replacing the

words of the original with appropriate English; he imprinted his own artistic stamp upon the

language and meaning. Whereas the 280 quatrains composed by Khayyam stand independent

of each other, in FitzGerald’s hands they become dependent stanzas within one long epic

poem. Roughly fifty of FitzGerald’s quatrains can be effectively termed paraphrases in the

traditional sense of translation.

Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the masterpieces in translation.

He himself stated that there might be no one else who took such care in translation as he did

with this piece. This bold statement might be contested by many, as his translations are often

found to be more artistic and less accurate. However, Edward Fitzgerald's version has

definitely gained more prominence than any of the originals.

The original quatrains of Omar Khayyam were never meant to be piled together in

any specific order. They were written as individual pieces, thoughts of the author on a

specific subject or feeling. Edward Fitzgerald took them, compiled them and managed to

create an epic poem with one central theme, namely carpe diem, or seize the day. While this
might seem like a completely uplifting message, the poem has some more sombre,

philosophical explanations for it. The individual should focus on the day, and enjoy the time

it has been given for this existence is the only true thing one can really know. One's past and

one's present are shrouded in mystery. One's place in the world is something only a higher

power would know. Omar Khayyam's solution to this mental dilemma was wine, a lot of

wine.

The poem presents us with a narrator whose life defies most of the standard staples of

a Muslim in the 11th century. The Middle East of this time was a centre of learning and

science, yet highly engaged in religious ritual. The original author himself is mostly known

for his astronomical and mathematical work. However, the character in the poem is basically

a drunk who refuses to learn, who talks of fate and creation as unmovable facts that make any

attempt to change one's life futile. The way the poem is written can be quite humorous at

times, with a strong focus on the drinking of wine. The symbol of the wine cup is a recurring

theme that keeps the audience focused on this one solution for all the world's problems. The

narrator argues that the audience should not learn, should not participate in religious tradition

and should not fight against their fate. The one thing they should do is drink, as the drunken

state is the one thing that truly brings you closer to God. Throughout this plethora of

references to wine, the narrator also talks about the inevitability of death.

Conclusively, while the individual quatrains can be quite uplifting, even intellectual,

the way Edward Fitzgerald chose to compile them gives the audience a character that seems

to be depressed by his own realizations on the futility of life itself. The audience is urged to

live in the day, as thought of anything else would depress you even more. No one can escape

death, and death truly is the end. This bleak outlook on live and religion nevertheless

manages to be one of the best written translations that managed to far out compete the

original. It also still reads as an uplifting tale of hedonistic pleasures and carelessness.