If all translators are traitors, as goes the Italian saying ("traduttori traditori"), then what fate should we reserve for the individual who does a interpretive translation? And what if the translator is accused of interpolation?
Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam is the most widely read - and quoted - work of poetry from the Orient. There have been numerous editions since its first publication in 1858, many with illustrations that may be blamed for turning this classic by the 11th-century Persian mathematician, physicist and astronomer into a kind of erotica.
The Rubaiyyat, for its length of 75 four-line "rubai" or stanzas, is perhaps the most frequent source of modern entries in English dictionaries of familiar quotations (35 citations in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 33 in Bartlett's).
The most famous,``Thou beside me singing in the wilderness'' has been the subject of countless illustrations; and ``thou'' has always been depicted as a handsome young houri (maiden). The admirers of Khayyam may be loath to know that ``thou'' does not sing and is not a houri in the original, but merely his Sufi fellow-initiate with whom he meditates over a book of poems. In Fitzgerald's Rubaiyyat, a garden is the setting for the musings and the yearnings of the persona and an expression of his moods; in the original there is no garden at all and each ``rubai'' is an individual short poem, a kind of epigram.
Using a 15th-century Oxford manuscript, Fitzgerald recreated the poem in the mid-Victorian style that was loosely based on the original Persian text. He had studied this very complex language for about four years before translating Khayyam's masterpiece with the help of a Persian-English dictionary, relying more on his intuitive guess than his knowledge of Persian in interpreting what a passage meant.
His translation was enthusiastically received by eminent Victorians including Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Meredith and Sir Richard Burton. He was lionized by critics for imposing a general order upon a disparate collection of Oriental verse. Fitzgerald issued four more editions before his death in 1883, by which time his fame had spread to America.
Fitzgerald was guilty of more than paraphrasing, omission and addition; he portrayed Khayyam as anti-Sufi, a hedonist and atheist. "Saki" (cup bearer), in Suffic fashion, can be a metaphor for God, and "wine" for divine love. This simple concept was not readily grasped by Westerners who believed that wine-drinking was forbidden for all Muslims.
In his translation of a 12th-century manuscript of The Rubaiyyat, made with the help of Omar Ali-Shah, the Sufi poet and classical Persian scholar, Robert Graves claimed that Fitzgerald's version of "Omar Khayyam's mystical poem has been erroneously accepted throughout the West as a drunkard's rambling profession of hedonistic creed: `let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.'
``Khayyam is also credited with a flat denial either that life has any ultimate sense or purpose, or that the Creator can be, in any justice, allowed any mercy, wisdom or perfection illogically attributed to Him, which is precisely the opposite view to that expressed in Khayyam's original.''
The question remains: can Fitzgerald be indicted for this transformation - or, to use his own jocular word, ``transmogrification'' - of Khayyam's mystical poem? If something had been lost in the process of translation, had something else been gained? Since the proof of the translation would be in the reading, I will let the readers decide by comparing the following versions of the best known of all the "rubai:"
From Fitzgerald's fifth edition:
A Book of Verse underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
A literal version of the above:
I desire a flask of ruby wine and a book of
verse,
Just enough to keep me alive, and half a loaf
is needful,
And then, that thou and I should sit in the
wilderness
Is better than the kingdom of a sultan.
From Graves-Shah translation:
Should our day's portion be one mancel loaf,
A haunch of mutton and a gourd of wine
Set for us two alone on the wide plain.
No Sultan's bounty could evoke such joy.
No text is sacrosanct, no classic untouchable in these times of political and cultural correctness. The debate on Fitzgerald's reputation as a celebrated translator, I suspect, is just beginning.
* Anand is a Montreal translator.