[In the following essay, Draper suggests that FitzGerald added numerous details of local color to the Rubáiyát because he was restyling the poem into an eclogue. Draper analyzes these additions, and maintains that they adhere to Persian scenery and customs.]

For his English version of the Rubáiyát of ‘Umar Khayyám (d.1124?), FitzGerald used two late and widely differing manuscripts: the Bodleian (1460-61) with 158 quatrains, and the Calcutta, an undated and ill-written Indian text, with 516. The more authentic Cambridge manuscript (1207) was not found until 1950. These two sources the translator treated with the greatest freedom. The disconnected quatrain-epigrams of ‘Umar, which are arranged alphabetically, Persian-fashion, he re-ordered to get the unity of a single poem; even in one rubá‘í, he might put together parts widely separated in the originals; and he omitted details, or added them from other Persian poets or even from his own knowledge or imagination, especially in the thirty quatrains that follow the three introductory “tavern” stanzas. In 1855, he had written his friend Cowell that such translation should be “orientally obscure [rather] than Europeanly clear”;¹ but, in 1857 and again in 1858, when he was at work on ‘Umar, he half boasts that he has “ingeniously tesselated [the originals] into a sort of Epicurean Eclogue in a Persian Garden.”² As FitzGerald was an enthusiastic Classical scholar, he must have known just what the term eclogue implied as to form and content; and ‘Umar's satiric-philosophic epigrams are certainly no “Eclogue,” in fact, no unified poem at all. In short, FitzGerald apparently proposed that the content and references of his translation be truly Oriental, even if “obscure,” but that these materials be combined into the stricter unity that the Greeks gave Western art. This would indeed be a tour de force.

Swinburne thinks that FitzGerald failed in the first half of his purpose, and asserts that the result belongs “as much or more to Suffolk than to Shiraz.”³ As a further complication, FitzGerald published three versions of his work: the first with 75 quatrains, a second with 110, and a third (the fourth, “standard” edition) with 101; and both the later texts show many detailed revisions. According to Housman, he was progressively “westernizing” the piece,⁴ but, like Swinburne, Housman gives no proof. The matter calls for investigation, one by one, of FitzGerald's additions; for whoever would express the culture of a distant time and place, as Shakespeare tried to do in Antony and Cleopatra, must risk many pitfalls of many sorts.⁵

The timeless Orient resists all change, and especially Irán, girt with deserts and stark, eroded mountains surrounding a central plateau within which a belt of irrigated oases in turn surrounds a great, lifeless waste, the dried up salt bed of a prehistoric inland sea.⁶ Except for a break in the mountains to the northeast and a few passes to the west and south, this central plateau, until the coming of the airplane, has been hard of access; and, especially in the last millenium, Irán, justly proud of its ancient heritage of culture and the arts, has looked inward upon itself, has scorned the invaders from barbarous Central Asia, and in two or three generations has, like the Chinese, conquered its conquerors. The Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet, but made the letters more decorative by omitting the base line. Even austere Arabic Islam acquired a more liberal Shia form, which allows the representation in art of living things forbidden by the Hadith, which they reject; and, in defiance of the Moslem calendar, this tenacious people still celebrate at the spring equinox the ancient Zoroastrian New Year's festival of Nawrúz. Persian culture, despite occasional Sunnite Turkish overlords and despite the Mongol massacres of whole cities, has survived with little change.⁷ Even today, though leading Persians are educated in Europe and America, remote oasis cities, especially half-Zoroastrian Kirmán, remain much as they always have been; and nationalistic pride in Iranian antiquities has grown even among the foreign-educated classes who often name their children for pre-Islamic Persian heroes, while the government builds towering monuments over the remains of the unorthodox Avicenna and ‘Umar. For the last thousand years, the Persian language has shown little variation;⁸ and Persian life, governed by the arid climate, chill in winter and torrid in summer, has continued its yearly and daily round. Between the twelfth century of ‘Umar and the nineteenth of FitzGerald, Persian mores, like Persian speech, have stayed very much the same; and, even now, some conservative localities can supply a check on the accuracy of FitzGerald's additions in relation to the facts of ‘Umar's time. In some instances, moreover, the miniatures of early manuscripts can further test this accuracy; and sometimes the finds of archæological excavation prove the antiquity of some object or custom to which FitzGerald refers. The assembling of this evidence on each detail that the translator added is no easy task; but, even if one slip here and there (and who does not?), the preponderance of correct or erroneous items should show approximately how far these additions are authentic; and then one should ask, in regard to those that are authentic, how this came about in an author who had never been to Irán.

Relying on this persistence of Persian custom, Professor Sir Arthur Arberry of Cambridge has recently analyzed⁹ for accuracy of local color FitzGerald's Quatrains 11 and 12:

With me along this strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
          Where name of slave and Sultán is forgot—
And Peace to Mahmúd on his golden Throne!
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
          Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Although Persian poets make each rubá‘í a separate epigram, FitzGerald re-arranged ‘Umar's to give them continuity; and, since the two just quoted seem to be a very free scrambling of the same two in the Bodleian manuscript (Nos. 149 and 155), one may properly treat them together, as does Sir Arthur. The scene, he remarks, is clearly a Persian picnic;¹⁰ and he attacks its accuracy of local color. The “strip of Herbage” and the “bough” of a tree are FitzGerald's additions; for the former appears in his source merely as lab-i-kisht, “margin of the sown”; and, for the latter, the Bodleian has only vírání, a “ruin” or a “wilderness.” Sir Arthur remarks that a Persian “Wilderness,” being desert, is not likely to have trees: in fact, however, irrigated Irán, even in the midst of the desert, often does have poplars, sycamores and the like, planted to shade the water channels and forestall evaporation—long lines of trees save where the peasants have illegally cut them down for firewood; and the hundred and twenty kilometers of road from Mashad to Níshápúr in Khurásán, where ‘Umar was born and died, show scores of examples.¹¹ In summer on Friday, the Moslem sabbath, the irrigated woods about the tomb of Firdawsí at Tús and the famous gardens around Shiraz are filled with picnickers. Where the water of an underground khanát comes to the surface is a favorite resort.¹² One hesitates to differ with so eminent an authority as Sir Arthur; but FitzGerald's “bough” and “strip of Herbage” are common enough for a desert picnic in Irán.

FitzGerald's “Book of Verses” appears in the Bodleian manuscript dated 1460-61; but Sir Arthur objects to it because it is not in the more authentic Cambridge manuscript of 1207, which, however, the translator could not have seen. Sir Arthur remarks that no Persian gentleman would need a volume of poems because he would know by heart “enough poetry to suffice him for many picnics.” Persian culture has always been highly literary; but, according to my friends Mr. H. Chams and Mr. J. Ghaznavi, both of Tehrán, an educated Persian might well take a book of poems to an al fresco collation, perhaps a copy of Háfiz to amuse the company by using it to foretell the future of each guest by a fál, or lot,¹³ just as the Romans used the sortes Virgilianæ. In 1887, when the late Professor Edward Browne of Cambridge spent his Year Amongst the Persians, he attended several gatherings for literary and philosophical discussion, sometimes with refreshments served out-of-doors, to which a guest might bring a volume; and, about 1920, the Princess Bibesco and Mirza Gül-Afchan used the text and miniatures of an old manuscript of Sa‘adi's Bústán as the theme of some hours' talk (doubtless with refreshments) in a rose-garden at Isfahán.¹⁴ This custom is evidently old; for a miniature dated 1480-90 shows Sultan Husayn Mirza taking wine beside a stream in his harem garden; and at the lower left, two ladies are reading a book; and a manuscript, dated in the 1530's, shows a Safaví shah and two courtiers feasting in an open pavillion while the entertainers play, and one reads, or chants, from an open volume.¹⁵ Indeed, if FitzGerald's “Book of Verses” did not accord with Persian custom, would the scribe of the Bodleian manuscript have added it in 1460-61?

The leg of mutton in the Persian original, FitzGerald omits; but he retains the more poetic bread and wine: in the first edition, a “Loaf of Bread”; in the second, “a little Bread”; and, in the fourth, again “a Loaf of Bread.” Sir Arthur is troubled that the translator does not indicate the fine wheaten quality of the bread; but in Irán even the peasants use only good wheat flour. Tavernier¹⁶ noted this in the 1630's, and it is still true. The loaf, however, as a Victorian would understand the term, is a most unhappy choice of diction; for traditional Persian bread comes in thin yellow sheets about a foot wide and some two feet long, the size of the bottom of the oven on which the dough was spread for baking over a sprinkling of little stones to make “pebble-bread”; and, as Tavernier noted, it was sometimes even “as thin as Paper.” It is unleavened and so glutenous and tough that tearing off a piece would be impossible if it were much thicker. To modern readers, “Loaf” does not present this picture. It is FitzGerald's one misleading detail; and one wishes that in his fourth edition he had retained “a little Bread” from his second. In Irán even today, European bread is a Westernism of the upper classes. To the Victorian reader, FitzGerald's “Loaf” would be all too “Europeanly clear,” and would falsify ‘Umar.

‘Umar's sources for Quatrain 12 (Bodleian 155 and Calcutta 490) have the “wine” contained in a “flask,” a convenient means of conveyance to a picnic; and, in the early editions, FitzGerald repeats this word; but, in the fourth, he changes it, perhaps as Sir Arthur suggests for rustic effect, to a “jug”; but jugs have such a variety of sorts and shapes that the substitution should doubtless be allowed.

A few other details, which Sir Arthur does not discuss, might have brief comment. The “Thou” of Stanza 12 seems to be FitzGerald's “Sákí,” whom all editions mention in the last quatrain. In the Cambridge manuscript, where each rubá‘i is a separate unit, this companion of the poet appears at times as a “darling Magian boy” (No. 30) and at times as “A lovely maid” (No. 83). These persons act as cupbearer (sáqí), lover, and/or musician. In the likewise separate quatrains of the Bodleian and the Calcutta that are FitzGerald's sources, they seem to be mainly drinking companions; but FitzGerald's unifying of the poem seems to have turned the “Thou” into a single person throughout. The sáqí of Calcutta 70, which is apparently one basis for FitzGerald's 12, is likened to a “houri” of the Moslem paradise; but Cambridge 161, which is probably what ‘Umar actually wrote, has no houri. This is an unhappy comparison; for in Irán “forbidden Wine” would be served by a Zoroastrian boy,¹⁷ and certainly not given to mortals by a celestial virgin.¹⁸ The translator prudently excised the houri, and, even more prudently, left uncertain the sex of his “Sákí.”¹⁹

FitzGerald changes details not only of content but also of style. In Quatrain 11, he turns the vague “Sultan's dominion” of Bodleian 149 into “Slave and Sultán” to suggest a slur on the notorious morals of Mahmúd of Ghazna. The allusion, however, is lost on English readers. At the end of No. 12, he adds for climax the double meaning of “Paradise” in the original sense of Persian pleasure garden and the derived sense of heaven, a play on words quite proper to Oriental poetic style; and, in the next quatrain, the use of “Paradise” in the latter sense makes a pun that heightens the effect.

In short, in these two quatrains, the translator revised, suppressed, and added details, and made changes down through the fourth edition; but his “Loaf” is the one note out of key—a proportion of one minor slip in local color out of nine changes. This proportion does not support Swinburne's aperçu that the translation is more English than Persian; and, whether the proportion holds true in FitzGerald's other quatrains can be ascertained only by a detailed examination of his style and symbolism and of his additions of Persian folklore, popular science, scenery, customs, and religion.

The literatures of China, Japan, and Irán have reaped from their long histories a wealth of poetic conventions and subtle connotations. FitzGerald did his best to capture the intricacies of ‘Umar's style; and what he did, as far as it went, is right. Apparently, the leg of mutton in the source of Quatrain 12 accorded with Persian literary taste, but the Victorian translator wisely left it out. The wealth of abstruse allusion in the original of the first stanza, he more and more suppressed in later editions,²⁰ so that, although his last version still describes dawn, the allusive quality has been changed; and the final line, miscopied in his manuscript (Calcutta 137), he quite abandoned.²¹ The difficulty of expressing twelfth century Persian ideas and things and literary effects in Victorian English is sometimes insuperable. FitzGerald, therefore, merely left untranslated the “single Alif” of Quatrain 50; sometimes, as in ‘Umar's parodies of the Qur'án, he translated without clarification; and in consequence the Western reader generally misses the parody and satiric point.²²

Although as late as September 1858, he wrote Cowell of “Omar's Simplicity”²³—whatever he meant by that term—the Persian originals teem with the witty devices of the Oriental Muse: triple and even quadruple rhymes, double meanings, contrasts of sound and of Arabic vs. Persian words, fragments of parody and veiled allusion, especially to the Qur'án, to Súfí philosophy, to Firdawsí's national epic, and to folk sayings. FitzGerald salvaged what he could; but many of these effects are untranslatable, just as the puns in Don Quixote are lost in another language. In rhyming, which is difficult in English, he contents himself with following ‘Umar's usual pattern of A A B A, without attempting such multiple rhymes as mai-khána-yi má and paimána-yi má in Calcutta 5; he rarely has rhymes within the line (e.g., Nos. 31 and 50), and has only one double rhyme, knowing and flowing in Quatrain 29. Reproducing ‘Umar's word-play was quite as difficult; but in No. 35 (cf. No. 20), he manages to carry over the pun on lip from Bodleian 100 and Calcutta 288. In No. 33, the pun on mourn and morn, like the double meaning of paradise, seems also to be his own. Such a “rich rhyme” is frowned on in English; but, if the sense of the words is different, Persian, like French, allows it; and so it may be accepted here. The double pun on not and knot in Quatrain 31 is likewise his own, though perhaps inspired by the repetition of band in Calcutta 319. Quatrain 74 in FitzGerald's first edition retains from Bodleian 5 and Calcutta 7 the pun on moon, usual in Persian poetry,²⁴ in the two senses of the heavenly body and the beloved. In Persian, the moon (máh) appears also in contrast to the giant fish (máhi) that was thought to support the world; and FitzGerald's “from Máh to Máhi” (No. 51) is a common phrase for expressing universality.²⁵ Bodleian 72, on which the passage is based, has only máh: the translator's pun is conventional Persian wit; but to use it he has to leave the key words untranslated and so only vaguely comprehensible. Likewise authentic but untranslated is the “single Alif” (No. 50) that is the clue to the universe and to God. In the Arabic alphabet, alif is the first letter, A. It is also the numeral, one; and, in Moslem poetry, it sometimes stands for the one and only Allah: to express the primacy and unity of God, FitzGerald plays on all these senses. His pun on “Paradise” has already been noted as authentically Persian. Indeed, he resorted to various devices to render Persian poetic style into English; and, since he could not translate ‘Umar's puns, he sometimes added his own to produce the effect.

Oriental peoples have various schemes of color symbolism, usually strange to Western ears. For example, the last two lines of FitzGerald No. 6, based on Bodleian 67, appear in the first edition:

          “Red Wine!” the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That yellow Cheek of hers to incarnadine.

If the translator meant merely and literally the yellow rose that grows wild in Irán, why in later editions did he change the adjective to sallow, which is less poetic, and has the bad connotation of sickness? In fact, however, the “yellow” of ‘Umar's original has the common implication of love sickness derived from the old Galenic medical theory that Greece gave to the Arabs, and the Arabs to Mediæval Europe, so that Shakespeare describes love sickness as a “green and yellow melancholy.”²⁶ In ‘Umar, as the text of Cambridge 211 shows, the reference is to that common theme of the Persian lyric, the unhappy love of the rose and the nightingale; and, in FitzGerald's lines, the bird tells the flower that ruby wine will cure its love sickness and redden its petals. Thus yellow appears only incidentally as a color and chiefly as a symptom, or symbol, of disease. Just so the celebrants of the Persian New Year cry to the ceremonial fire:

You take yellowness from me,
I take your redness.
You take the coldness from me,
I take your warmth.(27)

In his later editions, FitzGerald implies this bad connotation by substituting sallow; and so, contrary to Housman's theory, he brings his translation a shade nearer the original.

On the other hand, the translator's use of purple, though symbolic, is not Persian. In Quatrain 36 in the second edition (33 in the fourth), the first two lines read:

Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple for their Lord forlorn. …

In FitzGerald's source, Feridu'd-dín‘Attár's Mantiqu't-Tayr, distich 972, the sea appears realistically as “blue,” a color that in Persian symbolizes mourning; and Arabian geographers realistically call the Persian Gulf the “Green Sea.”²⁸ FitzGerald's purple seems to be symbolism rather than fact; but it is not Persian symbolism; for in Irán purple in ancient times belonged to royalty; and, in ‘Umar's day, it was the color of joy; and FitzGerald must have known this, for Calcutta 328 uses “purple fresh spring.” Even so, to go with mourn, he ignored both fact and Persian symbolism, and seems to have borrowed from the color-scheme of the Anglican ecclesiastical calendar, in which purple belongs to penetential seasons and to funerals. The meter would have allowed him to follow his source and use azure; but he chose rather to make the change, and falsify marine nature and Iranian background. In the case of sallow, the translator managed to retain both the literal color and the connotation of illness; in the case of purple, he sacrificed Oriental symbolism to be “Europeanly clear.”

Several symbols relating to love appear in FitzGerald's lines. The wild hyacinth of early Persian spring, hyacinthus orientalis, is the ancestor of our garden flower, but small and delicate like the bluebell. It is sometimes used as one of the seven plants to symbolize Nawrúz (new day), the old Zoroastrian New Year, still celebrated by all Persians at the March equinox.²⁹ In Persian poetry, its narrow leaves are compared to the beloved's hair;³⁰ and FitzGerald 19 concludes with the lines:

          That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.

This fanciful and very Persian conceit, that the leaves of the hyacinth actually are the hair of the loved one, does not appear in FitzGerald's sources: Bodleian 43 and Calcutta 49 mention tulips and violets but not hyacinths; and these quatrains seem to go back to ‘Umar's original in Cambridge 125 and 247. Here the translator has snatched a grace beyond his Persian poet's art, and extended a literary convention:³¹ he not only makes the usual comparison of hyacinth leaves to hair, but suggests that, just as the rose springs from a Caesar's blood, so hyacinth leaves grow from the hair of “some once lovely head.”

In Quatrain 41, FitzGerald has added “The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.” Bodleian 73 and the other sources suggested by Heron-Allen, have no “Cypress-slender”; but the metaphor is true both to the Persian landscape and to Persian literary convention: the narrow spires of the cypress trees shoot skyward like minarets from the thick foliage of a Persian garden; Cambridge 93 has “cypress-tall beauties”; Háfiz 9 and 75 has girls “slim as cypress-trees”; and Jámí compares the youth Salámán to a cypress.³² This sáqí, who sings and pours wine, is presumably a Magian, for only Magians were allowed to dispense wine; and, as they were famous for their beauty, the comparison that the translator adds is altogether appropriate. In Quatrain 74 of his first edition, FitzGerald addresses this sáqí in the common poetic convention³³ as “Moon of my Delight” with a pun on “Moon of Heav'n.” The pun seems to come from Bodleian 5 and Calcutta 7; but, in later editions, he discards this reference. In short, these details of the translator, except for “purple,” follow Persian realism and/or Persian literary convention.

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
          The Wine of Life keep oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

This quatrain, which FitzGerald added in his second edition as No. 8, is based on Bodleian 47, and that in turn presumably on Cambridge 136, both of which have Balkh instead of Babylon. Apparently, the original means that death must come whether life is bitter or sweet, whether one lives at Balkh, then a center of Zoroastrianism, or at orthodox Moslem Níshápúr, thus implying that religion like geography does not matter. FitzGerald, who may have missed the Zoroastrian reference in Balkh, then a center of Zoroastrianism, or at orthodox Moslem Níshápúr, thus implying that religion like geography does not matter. FitzGerald, who may have missed the Zoroastrian reference in Balkh, changed it, possibly for the sake of rhyme or because it seemed too erudite for English readers. In any case, both he and his source are simply stating with appropriate illustration the universality of death; but the slur on religion that ‘Umar implies is lost in the translation. What he says is not wrong but inevitably incomplete.

A number of FitzGerald's allusions relate to folklore and popular science. Quatrain 5 is too composite to have any single analogue; and the line “Iram indeed is gone with all his³⁴ Rose” raises questions as to meaning and source. Obviously, the ichabod theme is intended; but nothing of Irám appears in the ‘Umar manuscripts. The garden of that name at Tús near Mashad, made memorable by Firdawsí, and also the famous one outside Shiraz, after which Tamerlane is supposed to have named his Bagh-i-Irám at Samarqand, still exist, and so cannot be said to have “gone.” The ultimate source of these names is doubtless Irám, the terrestrial paradise of folk-legend,³⁵ supposed to have been constructed near Aden in Arabia by order of Shedád and mentioned in the Qur'an,³⁶ but FitzGerald's immediate source is more probably Jámí's Salámán and Absál.³⁷ In short, FitzGerald's “Iram” is authentic literary folklore.

In the same quatrain, the translator refers to “Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup” as also having vanished. This golden cup, in which that legendary king could view the whole universe and even future events, appears in folklore and also in Jám-i-Jam by Awhadí of Isfahán (d. 1337-8), which, however, FitzGerald had probably never read. The number seven is of course magical, and, like the seven spheres (No. 31) discussed below, seems to have come from Neo-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean sources. The “ring'd” refers to raised circles around the side (Plate II) that might measure the owner's capacity in drinking. Such ringed cups go back into pre-history;³⁸ and Jamshyd's cup may be even older than the hero himself, if, indeed, he ever lived. The fact that the rings are circular rather than spiral, as Mr. R. S. Stroud of the American Classical School at Athens pointed out to me, suggests Neolithic antiquity. Indeed, both folklore and archæology support the authenticity and antiquity of FitzGerald's reference.

The allusions to legendary heroes that appear in the translator's earlier quatrains are generally taken from his Bodleian and Calcutta sources; but one to Jamshyd and one to Kaikobád are in part his own. The last two lines of Quatrain 9 are based on Calcutta 497; and Sir Arthur notes that the translator misread dai (December) as dí (yesterday).³⁹ To make sense, FitzGerald produced a somewhat different stanza, in which he says that “this first Summer month” (June) “Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobád away.” For Jamshyd, this makes good sense: in spring, he is supposed to have ascended the throne, and instituted the festival⁴⁰ the full name of which is Nawrúz Jamshydi; and, as spring in most of Irán would end with May, “this first summer month” would be June when the happy season had passed “away.” The reference to Kaikobád is equally apposite; for, according to Firdawsí, he died in spring.⁴¹ Thus FitzGerald supplemented the “Jam u Kai” of the Calcutta manuscript from the Sháh Namáh. Stanza 59 turns the kimiya (alchemy) of Bodleian 77 and Calcutta 169 into an alchemist who can change lead into gold, a characteristic objective of the science of the day. In short, FitzGerald's references to folklore and folk heroes are properly Persian.

Quatrains 31, 32, and 33 present a group of references apparently to popular science and philosophy:

Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
                    And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road,
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.

The “Seventh Gate,” FitzGerald added to Calcutta 319, perhaps for the sake of rhyme. Súfí philosophy drew from its Neo-Platonic sources a system of planetary spheres that corresponded to grades of intelligence. The sphere of Saturn was the seventh above the earth and the third from the highest; and ‘Umar is saying that he has exhausted all these degrees of learning without solving the problem of man's destiny; but why the added reference to “Earth's Centre,” which has nothing to do with astral spheres and their intelligences? FitzGerald's source starts ‘Umar's journey at the geological center of the earth; and this seems hardly to fit with the translator's “Seventh Gate.” I would suggest that by “Earth's Centre” FitzGerald rather means Mecca or the seat of the Caliphate at Bagdad, either of which Moslems might take as the center of the earth, just as the Greeks took the omphalos at Delphi. In that case, the poet would reach “the throne of Saturn” from the face of the earth after passing the seven gates of the Neo-Platonic spheres. This explanation has the advantage of implying ‘Umar's favorite slurs against both Súfí philosophizing and the religion of Islam, neither of which had helped him solve the universal question of life.

Indeed, Quatrain 32 declares the bankruptcy of philosophy: “There was a Door to which I found no Key”; but Calcutta 403, on which this stanza is based, has no door and no key. FitzGerald's metaphor seems to come from an old Moslem saying that appears on the shrine—famous among Shia believers—of Ali at Najaf in Iraq:⁴² the door to eternal things has no key. Likewise appropriate are the references in Quatrain 33 to the inscrutability of “Earth” and of “the Seas … that mourn their Lord” and of the zodiac of “Heaven.” As Heron-Allen points out, the passage is inspired by ‘Attár's Mantiqu't-Tayr, and so is authentically Persian. These stars of the zodiac are “hidden in the sleeve of Night and Morn”: this is parallel to the common saying that the sleeve of eternity hides ultimate truth. FitzGerald's additions that relate to popular science and to folklore indeed run in the channel of Persian thought.

Since the translator thought to turn ‘Umar's salty epigrams into “a sort of Epicurean [but not quite Classical] Eclogue in a Persian garden,”⁴³ his added references to scenery and nature, which are commonest in the earlier quatrains, should be significant. The “strip of Herbage” and the “Bough” of a tree in the desert (Nos. 11 and 12) have already been tested and not found wanting. The “phantom of False morning” in No. 2 (in the first edition “Dawn's Left Hand”) is not in Calcutta 5, on which the quatrain as a whole is based, or in the analogue from Háfiz translated by Cowell,⁴⁴ which FitzGerald “greatly admired.”⁴⁵ This addition also is correct; for “False” dawn is a natural phenomenon in desert countries such as Arizona and Irán; and Edward Browne, on his way from Shiraz to Yazd in 1888, described it as a brightness in the sky more than an hour before sunrise.⁴⁶

In his first edition, FitzGerald refers to “this delightful Herb whose tender Green …” (No. 19); in the second, he substitutes “living Green” (No. 25); in the fourth, “this reviving Herb whose tender Green …” (No. 20). The source is Calcutta 46, which has only “verdure growing along a river bank”; but the earlier Cambridge manuscript (No. 125), which FitzGerald of course did not know, has the “soft down” of grass in spring. Fresh grass except in spring is rare in that land of “parcht herbage.”⁴⁷ Thus the translator's revisions indicate a springtime that his source hardly implies, but that apparently by accident, accords with ‘Umar's original. This instance hardly supports Housman's statement that FitzGerald was progressively “westernizing” his later editions.

In the old Zoroastrian days before the conquest by Islam, the Persian calendar was solar, and resembled the Julian in the contemporary Roman world. The year had twelve months of thirty days each and five or six additional days of Nawrúz at the March equinox.⁴⁸ Islam introduced a lunar calendar, which loses eleven days each solar year and so brings confusion to the months in relation to the seasons; but most Persians still celebrate the New Year at the old date, and sometimes even count from that time, so that the first month of spring would end late in April; and, since spring is brief in that continental type of climate, June is thought of as the first month of summer—“burning June,” as the Cambridge manuscript (No. 138) calls it. Around Shiraz, roses are in bloom by the first of April;⁴⁹ and sometime in June their flowering would generally be over.⁵⁰ FitzGerald, bent on composing an “eclogue” has in his earlier quatrains even more of roses and their time of bloom than has ‘Umar; but these times occasionally show disparity. His sources are consistent with fact and with the Persian calendar; and his first twenty-three quatrains also, with one exception, show a time pattern that accords with nature: New Year's (No. 4) shows early spring; and so do Nos. 5, 6, 7,—9 is the exception—11, 12, 14, and 20, with the “garden,” the nightingale and the rose, the “fire of Spring,” which seems to refer back to Nawrúz, and the “reviving Herb,” which also belongs early in the season. No. 9, however, contravenes both FitzGerald's chronology and the facts of nature when it mentions “this first summer month [June] that brings the rose,” and is put before the “reviving Herb” (No. 20). No. 23 likewise declares that “Summer dresses in new bloom”—and this in “burning June”!⁵¹ In No. 40, spring seems to re-appear with the tulip. Then nature is in abeyance until near the end of the poem when spring and the rose briefly return (Nos. 94 and 96). Thus Quatrains 9 and 23 not only go against FitzGerald's chronology and the facts of plant life in most of Irán, but also have no support in his sources; for Calcutta 447, which underlies the two final lines of No. 9, implies not summer but April; and Calcutta 404 and 85, which underlie FitzGerald 23, also have nothing of summer. The association of “new bloom” with June seems to belong, like purple as the color of mourning, to England rather than to Irán.

Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
          The Nightingale that in the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Here in Quatrain 96, FitzGerald turns the “bird of joy whose name was Youth” in Calcutta 328 into a nightingale. If this is a single nightingale, one can hardly object; but the parallel with youth and the rose suggests that it refers to the departure of all nightingales at the end of spring; and such is not always the case, for they were still singing when I was in Shiraz late in June, and Browne heard one near Yazd on the twenty-fifth of August.⁵² Most of the poet's vernal details are right; and perhaps in No. 96, he should be given the benefit of the doubt.

FitzGerald adds also allusions to social life and customs; and these would be especially hard to glean from literary sources, for generally they would seem to natives too obvious and commonplace to be recorded. Indeed, one can read all of Shakespeare's plays without gaining any clear idea of what Elizabethans usually ate for breakfast and just when they served dinner—facts that every one knew. The “Jug of Wine” and the sáqí-singer in Quatrain 12 have already been shown to be acceptable. In Quatrain 96, just quoted, “Youth's sweet-scented manuscript” appears in the source only as “the book of youth,”⁵³náma-yi javáni; and the translator added the idea of scented pages. The perfuming of fine manuscripts in the East is an ancient art; and the Princess Bibesco says that her old Firdawsí had the flavor of tallow, roses, and tobacco.⁵⁴ Doubtless the rose was the scent that the calligrapher intended, and the other two were acquired in some Persian household, for books easily take up smells. The saffron used for yellow in the miniatures and sometimes in the text⁵⁵ would at least for a time give out a perfume; and, in June 1857, Cowell's transcript of the Calcutta ‘Umar reached FitzGerald enclosed in a wooden box that had made the pages “aromatic.”⁵⁶ Youth's “manuscript” might properly, therefore, be “sweet-scented.”

Farrásh is a common Arabic-Persian word for a servant; and FitzGerald took it along with the rest of No. 45, from Calcutta 113; but, in the second and later editions, he added “dark”: perhaps he meant this tentsman, as in his source, to be dark and inscrutable “Death”; but a more realistic interpretation would make “dark” mean a negro slave, such as the “black called Elmas” whom the Mawwáb gave as a body servant to Edward Browne.⁵⁷ In fact, for centuries, Africa supplied negro slaves to Arabia and adjacent Moslem countries; and, on his Persian travels in the 1630's, Tavernier remarked that only negro eunuchs attended noblewomen.⁵⁸ “Dark,” therefore, in its literal sense is fitting.

In his comments on Persian customs, Tavernier describes “The Way of ordering their Feasts”: “The Guests come according to Invitation in the Morning to the House, and spend a whole Day in taking tobacco, and telling Stories. Between whiles they have Sweetmeats, Coffee and Fruits set before them. In the evening the Sofra is spread … and if the Person who treats be of any quality, he has a Governour of the Feast, who sits upon his Heels, and puts Rice and Meat upon little Plates which the Servants present … to every one of the Guests. …” Following this meal, “after some few Compliments, the Guests return home. …”⁵⁹ Some of the miniatures in early manuscripts in which notables and their friends are enjoying light refreshments doubtless depict such preprandial festivities. Early in the nineteenth century, Sir William Ousley on his mission to Tehrán was sumptuously entertained at similar state dinners, for which the guests assembled in the afternoon, and following some hours of conversation over hors d'oeuvres and drinkables had the main meal served usually in another room, and then made their polite congé. The Persians claim that since conversation is more likely to be brilliant before heavy eating than after it, the Western custom is inferior to theirs. Browne similarly describes the traditional dinner-party away from the “semi-Europeanized capital”: “The guests arrive about sundown, and are ushered into what corresponds to the drawingroom, where they are received by their host and his male relations.” Here they are entertained with refreshments, music, and perhaps dancing boys. The supper is served on the floor often in another room where the guests “squat down on their knees and heels round the cloth. …”⁶⁰

The preliminaries of such a dinner party seem to supply the metaphorical background for FitzGerald's Quatrains 22 and 23, the sources of which are Bodleian 189 and 404: the former refers to the occasion as “the Party of Life”; and the latter advises the reader to “sit down and let the world pass in happiness.” FitzGerald at once disguises and adds to his sources: with “some we loved,” we are to drink and “make merry” on a “Couch,” apparently the usual Persian divan with rugs and saddlebags, of which the nearest Victorian equivalent would be a “Couch.” FitzGerald does not say, as his source does, that the occasion is a “party”; but the wine and merriment while sitting on a “Couch” suggest it; and they are FitzGerald's own. In conclusion, instead of going in to dinner, we die—an ironic climax quite in ‘Umar's style. The translator's references to these Persian customs—the “Book of Verses” on a picnic, the “sweet-scented manuscript,” the negro slave who pitches and strikes tents, the details of a ceremonious dinner, and also the celebrations at Nawrúz, shortly to be described—are surprisingly correct; for, though a foreigner might notice them, a Persian would take them for granted, and hardly think to write them down; and everyday realism is not characteristic of Oriental literature.

In No. 38 of FitzGerald's first edition, the “Caravan” of the poet “Starts” on its abortive journey while “The Stars are setting” just before “Dawn,” though Bodleian 60 and Calcutta 138 imply a journey at night in accordance with common usage in the heat of summer.⁶¹ FitzGerald's second edition (No. 49), by changing “Starts” into “Draws,” suggests that the trip is concluding at “Dawn,” and, therefore, took place at night as his sources imply. The fourth edition (No. 48) does not state the time of travel. The matter is incidental; but, whether the translator changed his sources or followed them, or ignored the question of night or day, he can hardly be accounted wrong, for caravans, at least in the cooler seasons, might start or stop at any hour.

Some of the translator's allusions are definitely Moslem, but most of these come from his sources. Sometimes, however, he adds a new turn, as when he puts his skepticism of future rewards into the mouth of “A Muezzim from the Tower of Darkness” (No. 25). The original, Calcutta 411, has merely a “declaration from a hiding place”; but FitzGerald, as ‘Umar might have, puts this cynical jibe into a Moslem call to prayer from a minaret in the “dark” before dawn. Since Islam accepts the Bible, the reference to David that he adds to Quatrain 6 may be taken as properly Islamic; and, indeed, David the sweet singer is a commonplace of Persian poetry.⁶² The “cup” of death that “all are given to quaff” appears in Calcutta 256, which is the basis of FitzGerald's 43; but, in authentic Islamic tradition, he adds within this cup the “darker” draught (“drink/Of darkness” in the first edition) and its presentation by the Angel of Death. The “river-brink” seems to be put in for rhyme, a sort of Styx beneath the bridge that according to the Qur'án led to Paradise. Perhaps one should count also as Islamic the reference (No. 60) to the holy war of Mahmúd of Ghazna in India, which FitzGerald took from ‘Attár's Mantiqu't-Tayr.⁶³ The literary trappings of religion are almost as unchanging as religion itself; and FitzGerald reflects these timeless matters.

Concerning religious minorities in Irán, neither ‘Umar nor FitzGerald offer anything significant on the Jews or on the Christians, Armenian or Nestorian; and this makes all the more significant the many references to the Zoroastrians, a few of whom still led a precarious existence very much to themselves in remote oases of eastern Irán, tended their fire-temples, and in their homes followed the customs of the “old religion.” Several of FitzGerald's additions already discussed, such as the references to Jamshyd and to Kaikobád, might have been put into this category but for the fact that Irán as a whole retained them even after the Islamic conquest. The “Angel shape” in Quatrain 58 apparently arose, like several other passages, from the translator's misreading of his difficult original;⁶⁴ for, in Calcutta 302, he took pírí (elder) for pirí (heavenly being), and so gave the passage a Zoroastrian cast: no Moslem angel would advise the faithful to drink wine, whereas the Zoroastrians used ritually the intoxicating haoma,⁶⁵ which was thought to give “purity and life to the soul and body.”⁶⁶

Quatrains 6 and 7 are FitzGerald's most Zoroastrian. In the former, the nightingale sings “Wine! Wine! Wine!” to the rose in “divine, High-Piping Pehleví”; and the source for these lines, Bodleian 67, does not contain the words “divine” or “High-Piping.” Pehleví is the name of the script and of the language used during the centuries of the Parthian and the Sassanid dynasties before the Islamic conquest. In ‘Umar's time, it was still being written by the Magian priests, and is used today by the Parsis in their prayerbook, the “little Avesta.” In both India and Irán, the ritual chanting is in the “High-Piping,” tenor register, no matter what the natural speaking voice of the móbed or dastúr. The Zoroastrians, until recently, have guarded their rituals with great secrecy, and have not permitted even their own lower orders to approach the sacred fire; and, their priests in Tehrán have refused to chant for recording by an eminent Avestan scholar from Europe.⁶⁷ How did FitzGerald come to know the “High-Piping” of the “divine” liturgy?

The next quatrain urges that the cup be filled to celebrate the budding year; and, at the spring equinox, all Irán, Moslem as well as Zoroastrian, still celebrates Nawrúz with feasting and visiting and picnics. FitzGerald, adding to Calcutta 447, tells the reader to fling away “in the fire of spring” the old clothes of winter repentance; and the “thread-bare Penitence” torn “apieces” by “Spring” that FitzGerald in all editions (Nos. 70, 102, and 96) adds to Calcutta 518 and 497 seems likewise to be a reference to the Nawrúz festival. Indeed, the lack of fuel among the poor and the open, high-ceilinged houses of the rich make winter a penitential season, even if the snow “upon the Desert's dusty Face” lasts only “little hour or two” (No. 12). Persian life, moreover, is geared to outdoor living, and spring, with good reason, is a time of relief and rejoicing. The seventeenth century traveller Tavernier noted that at Nawrúz a poor man will even “Mortgage his own Body” to buy new clothes.⁶⁸ On Cháhr Sambeh Suri, the Wednesday before the festival, a Persian family used to build a bonfire, and jump over the dying flames, each one's face half-covered, like a Magian priest's, to avoid polluting the fire with his breath; and, for good luck in the coming year, he would recite the ancient rhyme already quoted. To complete the charm, the ashes were scattered at the crossroads.⁶⁹ Mr. Chams says that the burning of old clothes at Nawrúz was once quite usual; but it can hardly have a Zoroastrian origin, for they would certainly pollute the sacred fire. During the festival that follows, the populace of Shiraz streams out of town to picnic in Irám and other gardens.⁷⁰ In short, FitzGerald's added details are right: the burning of castoff garments in the auspicious fire, the donning of new, the brimming cup, and the first picnic of spring.

Until recently, a Persian gentleman drank his wine from a shallow metal cup (jám) held elegantly from below between his finger-tips (Plate I). FitzGerald repeatedly refers to drinking from a “cup” (Nos. 7, 21, 22, 30, 39, 62, and 93), sometimes adding the word to his original. Such cups, made of metal, not of glass, appear in the miniatures of fifteenth and sixteenth century manuscripts;⁷¹ and some of the same shape, though broader, occur in a banquet scene pictured on the wall of a house in recently excavated Pyanjikent near Samarkand, and dated from the seventh or the eighth century.⁷² Even earlier, Parthian and Sassanian statues, reliefs, and wall paintings seem to show such cups—one as early as the fifth century B.C.⁷³ In Armenia at the Uratian city of Teisbaini, sacked by the Scythians in 585 B.C., Russian archæologists found ninety-seven nested bronze cups each with the name of a king of Urartu inscribed at the center.⁷⁴ For centuries, such metal vessels would seem to have been the traditional drinking cups of Irán and adjacent regions; and since they appear both earlier and later, they may be taken as belonging to the twelfth century when ‘Umar lived; and they seem to have been made of bronze, silver, or gold, rather than of glass.⁷⁵

Probably at least as old as the celebration of Nawrúz is the Zoroastrian custom at social gatherings of pouring a libation—not to divinities, as the Romans did—but as a sort of Requiescat in pace to some dead friend. Browne, who was present on such occasions and describes them, says that a short prayer for the departed was often said and that the vessel used was “not a glass but a little brass bowl,” and inside this “bowl” or cup was the name and the year of death of the person so remembered.⁷⁶ As this was doubtless the drinking cup of the deceased during his lifetime, it could not be made of glass, for then the date of his death could not be added. Such cups, made of copper mined with gold, are prized heirlooms in Kirmán⁷⁷ (Plate II). Since Zoroastrianism is certainly as conservative as other religions, the use for this purpose of such engraved cups doubtless dates at least from ‘Umar's time. Indeed, the custom, if not the shape of cup, seems to be much older; for Professor Ghirshman has excavated some made of pottery and some of metal, used for libations in the Bronze Age about 1000 B.C.⁷⁸ Today the libation is poured on a plant or shrub, which in summer would become “parcht herbage.” In the second (No. 42) and later editions, FitzGerald clearly refers to this custom:

And not a drop that from our cups we throw
On the parcht herbage but may steal below
          To quench the fire of Anguish in some Eye
There hidden—far beneath, and long ago.

In the fourth edition, he substitutes for “On the parcht herbage” the phrase “For Earth to drink of”; but the reference is still the same.

In his two final stanzas, FitzGerald again alludes to this custom. The first of these is based on the last two lines of Bodleian 5 and on Calcutta 7, in which the poet urges the drinking of wine by moonlight because some day the moon will seek but not find us. The sources of the last quatrain are Bodleian 83 and 84. In the former, the poet asks a group of his friends, when he is dead and they are drinking together and his turn would come, to pour the wine from the cup. The last two lines of No. 84 are translated: “when the sáqí takes the Magian wine in hand, remember your prayers to one helpless.” Taken together, these two stanzas can be interpreted only as a libation. In his first edition, FitzGerald has the poet address his beloved conventionally as “Moon of my Delight” and exclaim that on some such future occasion, the moon will look “Through this same Garden after me—in vain!” This particularizes the occasion and refers it to his own death.

The next (and final) quatrain shows that this moonlit “Garden” is the setting for a gathering of “Guests”; and, in the fourth edition, following Bodleian 84, the poet calls his beloved a “Sákí” (cup-bearer) and asks him (or her) to pour a libation for him:

And when I like her [the moon], oh Sákí, you shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scattered on the Grass,
          And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made One—turn down an empty Glass!(79)

Thus the translator puts together from his two sources the moonlit garden with its company of friends, the poet thinking on his own death, and the cupbearer from whom he asks a libation for his soul's repose. Even if this referred merely to ordinary wine-drinking, the “Glass” should be a metal cup.

Of FitzGerald's more than fifty additions, only five or six are wrong or at least misleading: the “Loaf” of bread on a picnic and the “Glass” for wine-drinking and libations are the most unhappy slips; more excusable is the “Angel Shape,” which came from a mis-reading of the difficult Calcutta manuscript; the “purple” sea seems to have been a deliberate use of English ecclesiastical symbolism; the nightingale's song, which apparently stopped in June, is a doubtful example; and June as the date when “Summer dresses in new bloom” (No. 23) and “brings the Rose” (No. 9) seems to be an unwitting intrusion of English fact. All these amount to a mere tithe of FitzGerald's additions. Swinburne is certainly mistaken in saying that the translation belongs “as much or more to Suffolk than to Shiraz.” Four or five of these slips, to be sure, seem to be English, but with no special reference to Suffolk; and the “Angel Shape” is not English at all. Housman also is mistaken in saying that the later editions are progressively “westernizing” the piece: all the errors just listed except the “purple” sea appear in the first edition; although FitzGerald by degrees simplified the difficult Oriental allusions of the initial quatrain, yet elsewhere he made some later revisions that are more precisely Persian, such as the change from yellow to sallow to express ‘Umar's connotation of lovesickness, the farrásh who apparently becomes a negro, the dinner guests who sit on a couch, and the added quatrain (No. 42) on libations for the dead. Truly FitzGerald's errors are few and generally slight; and, as he revised, he did not increase their number.

These additions show great variety, and some of them considerable knowledge of things Persian: tricks of style, references to folklore and popular science, details of Persian scenery, Persian customs and matters of religion, especially the Zoroastrian. They show a very catholic interest in Irán. Some are merely witty devices to replace the sly puns and parodies that could not be translated; but most of them have a pictorial concreteness that makes the lines more vivid, quite to the taste of the Victorian reader: a verb to “make merry,” nouns such as the “Bough” of a tree or a “strip of Herbage,” and adjectives such as “Cypress-slender” and “dark” and “sweet-scented.” Nearly all of these changes are in the first third of the poem or in the last seven quatrains; for the more philosophical stanzas that come between give less opportunity for descriptive detail. In consequence, FitzGerald's work, like the da capo form in music, has a cyclic unity, in which the end harks back to the initial theme. As Collins had vainly attempted in his Oriental Eclogues just a century before, the Victorian poet was trying to express an Eastern setting in a Hellenistic literary form; but his results are not only more poetic and far more Oriental, but also a truer synthesis: the verbal trickery of his style carries over Persian usage; and the added details of local color are types of subject matter proper to the pastoral tradition of Theocritus and Virgil, who also present country scenery, folklore, and common customs; but Greeks and Romans would have scorned Persian details. In the earlier letters to Cowell, FitzGerald had approved such an expression of Eastern epigrams unified in “a sort of … Eclogue” form; and this uniting of East and West and of disparate fragments into a coherent whole, he so successfully achieved that readers seldom realize that the title word rubáiyát (quatrains), which he retained from ‘Umar, is a plural, as if it referred to a collection of separate pieces, as indeed in the original it did.

But where did FitzGerald get all this authentic local color? Some of it, he seems to have taken from Persian poetry; but, much of it, such as the picnic, the dinner party, the libations, the folklore, and the Magian chanting, are intimate matters of Persian life, too commonplace, or too secret, for the Persians themselves to record. George Cowell, who later became Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, had started FitzGerald on the Persian language early in the 1850's, and had supplied him with a copy of the Bodleian manuscript; but Cowell had never been to Irán, and, about the time that FitzGerald began translating ‘Umar, he left for his years of teaching in India. FitzGerald must soon have realized that his originals gave him much less of Persian customs and Persian scenery than the eclogue form demands; but his lengthy correspondence with Cowell, though full of matters that relate to ‘Umar's text and meaning, has practically nothing of the details that he added;⁸⁰ and Cowell, therefore, could hardly have supplied them.

In September 1854, FitzGerald had written his friend, praising Sketches of Persia by Sir John Malcolm,⁸¹ who in 1800 and in 1810 had gone there on diplomatic and military missions; and, at about the same time, he was using Sir William Ouseley's Travels (1810-12) to explain a passage in Jámí's Salámán, which he was then translating; but, when he started on ‘Umar in July 1856, he apparently made little or no use of either Malcolm or Ouseley, though both have material on Persian customs. Malcolm says that the very peasants around Isfahán eat wheaten bread;⁸² but FitzGerald in Quatrain 12 does not even follow his source and call the “Loaf” wheaten. Even when the two discuss the same subject, moreover, Malcolm does not supply the translator's additions. He has a “ferrash” who pitches tents;⁸³ but does not describe him as a negro or as “dark.” Malcolm tells of a party in which the guests “sat” in successive rooms,⁸⁴ but no “couch” or divan appears; and Malcolm cites yellow as the color in Firdawsí that symbolizes fear,⁸⁵ not illness as in FitzGerald. He refers to Háfiz' conceit that the tulip springs from the blood of Farhád, the lover of Shírín;⁸⁶ but, in FitzGerald, the redness of the rose came from a Caesar's blood. Indeed, though the translator seems to have owned a copy of Malcolm's Sketches, he apparently did not consult it for his additions to ‘Umar.

Ouseley he had used at least once in translating the Salámán; and his references to Jamshyd's season ending with spring might have come from the Travels. In one reference, Ouseley's farrásh is a negro;⁸⁷ and, in another volume, a farrásh, black or white, seems to pitch and strike tents;⁸⁸ and FitzGerald may have put these two passages together to get his “dark Ferrásh”; but elsewhere his additions do not agree with Ouseley. In the Travels, the cypress tree is not a comparison for a slender youth or maid, but a symbol of death⁸⁹ venerated by the Zoroastrians. Ouseley's detailed description of a state dinner tendered the British envoy has no couch;⁹⁰ and he remarks that Arabian geographers call the Persian Gulf the “Green Sea”;⁹¹ whereas FitzGerald's sea is “purple.” The translator apparently did not turn as a source for manners and customs to books of foreign travellers—even those that seem to have been on his own library shelves.

About the time that FitzGerald began his Persian studies with Cowell, he acquired a copy of John Richardson's Dictionary,⁹² an eighteenth century compilation mainly translated from the Russian; but, by June 1854, some two years before he started work on ‘Umar, he was using instead the more recent and “far better” lexicon by Francis Johnson.⁹³ Appended to the Richardson is a “Dissertation on the Language, Literature and Manners of Eastern Nations”; but, though it speaks briefly of Nawrúz among other festivals, it has nothing of flinging castoff clothing into the sacred fire. It has nothing of desert picnics or of a couch for preprandial refreshments, or of libations to the dead, nothing of false dawn or of Jamshyd's seven-ringed cup, or of the tenor chanting of Magian priests. FitzGerald's use of Richardson seems to have ended when he acquired the Johnson.

In short, FitzGerald for his additions to ‘Umar apparently did not consult his own books that he had previously used; and this seems strange. As early as 1856, however, when he was starting on ‘Umar, his eyes were “troubling him” so much that he “read really little except Persian”;⁹⁴ and the script of the Calcutta manuscript would surely be strain enough. One might therefore ask whether he could have had this added material by word of mouth from someone who was conveniently at hand.

At this point, I consulted Professor A. McKinley Terhune of Syracuse University, who has given years of study to FitzGerald's life; and he kindly called my attention to a Major Thomas H. J. Hockley, who had retired from the Indian army in 1833, was living near FitzGerald at Ipswich, and had started FitzGerald's friend Cowell on his Persian studies. Major Hockley (1790-1878) spent many years in the Company's service in India, where among other tasks he was interpreter in Persian; and he may well have known Parsis, who were prominent in India as bankers, and could have supplied him with a knowledge of many things Zoroastrian. In 1820, he was granted a three-year furlough to Europe, and might have travelled through Irán; and, during the following ten years, he had five extended leaves during some of which he might have gone there,⁹⁵ possibly as one of the officers sent to advise the Persians in their intermittent wars with Russia. Since he seems to have spoken Persian fluently and with a correct pronunciation,⁹⁶ one wonders how he could have learned that in India, where the Iranian in common use (Urdu) differs from the speech of Irán.⁹⁷ If a native Persian taught him, the instruction might well have included something of manners and customs and even folklore. At all events, a native Persian is more likely in India than Suffolk; and Professor Terhune, who is working on FitzGerald's unpublished manuscripts, does not think that the translator knew any natives of Irán. In January 1854, FitzGerald writes of going to Ipswich “to have some Persian with the Major”; and, in August, he had asked Hockley to help him with the mysticism of Jámí's Salámán.⁹⁸ After Cowell went to India in 1856, Hockley may well have made suggestions for the first edition of the ‘Umar, which appeared in 1859.

A dozen or more of the early quatrains of this first edition, including most of those with Zoroastrian allusions, would seem to owe something to the Major, especially Nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 22, 24, 31, and 33.⁹⁹ These stanzas are among the best in the poem; and, although a third of the quatrains in the first edition underwent radical change before publication in the fourth, none of these twelve was substantially revised. If this theory of Major Hockley's influence is correct, the reader owes him a debt of gratitude for the vivid local color of some dozen quatrains of the Rubáiyát that help to give it a unified setting “in a Persian Garden” with forms of allusion and metaphor proper to a Classical eclogue and yet with subject matter that is authentically Persian.¹⁰⁰

Notes

1. A. J. Arberry, FitzGerald's Salámán and Absál (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 9 and 20, hereafter cited as Salámán.

2. A. J. Arberry, The Romance of the Rubáiyát, New York (c. 1959), pp. 81 and 95, hereafter cited as Romance.

3. Ibid., p. 25.

4. Rubáiyát (London and Glasgow, n.d.), p. 7.

5. J. W. Draper, “The Realism of Shakespeare's Roman Plays,” SP [Studies in Philology] XXX (1933), 231-237.

6. R. Ghirshman, Iran (ed. princ., 1951; Penguin ed., 1954), “Introduction.”

7. See studies by J. H. Iliffe, D. T. Rice, and R. Levi in The Legacy of Persia, ed. Arberry (Oxford, 1953), pp. 13, 15, 32, 41, 60, and 74-75. See also R. Ghirshman, Persian Art (New York, c. 1962), pp. 6, 18, and 339; and A. J. Arberry, Shiraz (Norman, Okla., c. 1960), pp. 40-41.

8. E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, 1951), II, 2.

9. A. J. Arberry, Omar Khayyám, a New Version (New Haven, [1952]), pp. 21-24, hereafter cited as Omar. See also Romance, p. 121.

10. Miss Anderson's illustration reproduced in many editions shows vegetation wider than a “strip,” no carpet, no sákí, no irrigation ditch, and of course no mutton; but the bare rocks of the background suggest the eroded mountains of Irán.

11. Dr. P. W. English of the University of Wisconsin kindly brought to my attention Torikh-i-Kirmán by Ahmad ‘Ali Khan-i-Vazari (U. of Tehrán Press, 1961). Plates 9 and 10 illustrate such a setting. See also V. Kubíčková, Persian Miniatures [chiefly of the Safavid period, in the Gulistán Palace Library], tr. Finlayson-Samsour (London, n.d.), Plates 9, 10, and 12.

12. See Plate I of the present study; Basil Gray, Persian Miniatures from Ancient Manuscripts [fifteenth and sixteenth centuries] (Mentor-Unesco, c. 1962), p. 23 and Plates 10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26; Kubíčková, Plate 25; and J. S. Sorushián, Farhang-e Behdinán [a lexicon of Zoroastrian customs] (Tehrán, 1956), Plate II, a photograph taken about 1900, which pictures a collation apparently in a courtyard, with guests on their knees and heels around a carpet on which viands are placed. The author writes me, August 6, 1962, that the central figure is reading from a volume of Firdawsí.

13. E.g., E. G. Browne, Literary History, III, 322-323. By such a fál, it was decided to bury Háfiz in consecrated ground despite clerical objections. See Sir John Malcolm, Sketches in Persia (London, 1827), II, 100. Indeed, Malcolm himself used this device to decide whether to publish his Sketches.

14. G. V. Bibesco, The Eight Paradises (New York, c. 1923), p. 163 ff.

15. Gray, Plates 17 and 18.

16. Travernier, Travels, in John Harris, Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1705), II, 342.

17. Since Moslems are forbidden to drink wine, though some take this prohibition lightly, all dealing in such beverages fell into the hands of the Zoroastrians, who made, sold, and served it.

18. As this reference to a “houri” is not in Cambridge 161, which is its analogue in ‘Umar's actual text, it was probably added to Calcutta 70 in India.

19. Quatrain 101.

20. Omar, p. 18 ff.

21. Romance, pp. 137-138.

22. Thus, for example, in No. 13:

                        Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
    Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum.

    One loses the full effect unless one knows the Persian saying that a drum makes a great noise, but it's empty. Of course, this emptiness and also the distance makes the “Credit” quite worthless. The saying goes back to the ancient story of the fox and the drum in the Hindu Fables of Bidpai. See Browne, History, III, 350 ff.

23. Romance, p. 17.

24. Cf. Háfiz, 194; and Jámí's Absál refers to her lover as “moon of beauty” (Salámán, p. 175).

25. E.g., Cambridge MS. 124, on which Bodleian 133 seems to be based. See E. Heron-Allen, Edward FitzGerald's Rubá'iyát (London, 1899), pp. 80-83.

26. Twel. II, iv. 112. See J. W. Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare's Characters (Durham, N. C., 1945), pp. 65 and 68-69.

27. M. S. Esfandiary, “The Year that Begins with Spring,” Gourmet, XXII (1962), 22.

28. Sir William Ouseley, Travels (London, 1819), I, 329. The green is doubtless due to the blowing in of yellow desert sand.

29. A. Hátami, “Iran's National Holiday,” Iran Review, VI (1961), 3-6. Dr. C. S. Coon found the custom also in Caspian Mazanderán (Seven Caves, [New York, 1957], p. 184). This festival goes back to the earliest days of the Persian Empire. See A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago, c. 1948), p. 275.

30. E.g., Salámán, pp. 69 and 171.

31. Browne, Year, p. 543.

32. Salámán, pp. 113, 171, 172.

33. Browne, Year, p. 543.

34. The first edition reads “its.” The “his” of the later editions is doubtless an Elizabethan archaism. Cf. Quatrain 33, line 3.

35. Browne, Literary History, III, 525-26.

36. Sura LXXXIX, 5.

37. Romance, p. 196.

38. Such cups may derive from the primitive method of making pottery, when the sides of the vessel were built up by superimposing rolls of clay on one another. This would leave ridges if the surface were not much smoothed. Even when the bowls were made of metal, such rings, which could be narrower and sharper in the new medium, might still be used as a traditional decoration. A many-ringed pottery vessel (ca. 1000 B.C.) is in the Irán Bástán at Tehrán; and in 1957 Dr. R. S. Young from the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania found at Gordium, the capital of ancient Phrygia, several hundred bowls (750-700 B.C.) with varying numbers of rings (Plate II). One of these in the Archæological Museum at Ankara is a seven-ringed bronze vessel. At the bottom centered between the circling ridges, is a rounded protuberance like a miniature of the omphalos at Delphi, which the Greeks believed to be the magic navel of the world. This use of the omphalos in Persian drinking cups goes back at least to Parthian times and is illustrated in the Oxus Treasure (R. Ghirshman, Persian Art. pp. 265-266). Thus Jamshyd might be thought to survey all creation by looking into his cup. Ringed vessels are also in the Agora Museum at Athens and in Crete.

39. Romance, p. 144.

40. Ouseley, I, 224 and III, 342-343.

41. Sháh Namáh, ed. Eghball (Tehrán, 1934), p. 314.

42. Kindly supplied me by Mr. Ghaznavi of Tehrán.

43. Letters, ed. Wright, I, 269, Nov. 2, 1858.

44. Published in Fraser's Mag., Sept. 1854.

45. Heron-Allen, pp. 4-5.

46. E. G. Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (New York, 1926), p. 388.

47. FitzGerald, 2nd ed. Cf. Browne, Year, pp. 285 and 323.

48. Browne, Year, pp. 412-413.

49. Ibid., p. 283.

50. Bibesco, pp. 67, 80, 161-162. Today the ever-blooming hybrid teas might blossom all summer; but these varieties did not exist in ‘Umar's, or even in FitzGerald's time.

51. Cambridge 38. This same confusion as to the dates of roses' blooming in England and in Irán appears in a letter of FitzGerald's dated July 1, 1857, when he was making his translation. See Letters, ed. Wright, I, 265. In No. 39 (4th ed.), FitzGerald omitted the “parcht herbage” of the second edition, probably to avoid inconsistency with the “Tulip” of the following quatrain.

52. Browne, Year, pp. 596-597.

53. Cambridge 12 has no “sweet-scented.”

54. Bibesco, p. 174.

55. The Magian priests used saffron for writing certain magic words (J. Richardson, “Dissertation” prefixed to his Dictionary [London, 1829], p. liii).

56. Romance, pp. 64-65.

57. Browne, Year, p. 289. Cf. pp. 372-373.

58. Tavernier in Harris, II, 342.

59. Ibid., II, 343.

60. Browne, Year, pp. 119-121. In June 1962, the eminent Professor Chams of Tehrán honored me with a somewhat similar repast, which started about six with light refreshments and talk on one side of the pool in his spacious courtyard and ended with a late dinner on the other side. For the conversational prelude, most of the guests sat; for the dinner itself, a few chairs were provided for Europeans.

61. Ibid., pp. 596 and 598; Bibesco, p. 174. ‘Umar's original, reflected in Cambridge 64, seems to have the caravan go by night.

62. Romance, p. 197.

63. Ibid., p. 219.

64. Ibid., pp. 21-22 and 218. Cf. Cambridge 107. FitzGerald, moreover, had poor eyesight (Romance, pp. 15-16).

65. It is made from the small red berries of a desert shrub. It seems to be depicted in a miniature of a fifteenth century manuscript of the Kalila and Dimna, reproduced in Kubíčková, Plate 10.

66. S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (New York, 1960), pp. 609, 613, and 623.

67. When making recordings for me in Bombay, Dasturji Minocher-Hemji chanted, not in the fire-temple, but in his rectory. On this music, see “Zoroastrian Chant and Early Christian Plainsong,” about to appear in the volume celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. In Kirmán, I had the unique honor of sitting beside the móbed before the sacred fire while he chanted from the Gāthās. All my recordings, made in India and in Irán, are sung in tenor.

68. Tavernier in Harris, II, 342.

69. Esfandiary, p. 22.

70. Browne, Year, p. 284. Cf. 372-373.

71. E.g., Gray, Plates 2, 3, 10, 19; Kubíčková, Plates 21, 34, 37.

72. A. L. Mongait, Archæology in the U.S.S.R., tr. Thompson (Baltimore: Penguin ed., c. 1961), Plate 19 and p. 253.

73. Ghirshman, Persian Art, Plates 40, 59, 61, 257, 259.

74. Mongait, pp. 209, 212-223.

75. John Richardson, A Specimen of Persian Poetry (London, 1774), taken largely from a book by Baron Revizky, the Polish envoy to Irán. It mentions “glass” as one material from which some cups of “eastern nations” were made (p. 68). If Irán is meant, this seems to be an example of early European influence. I owe this reference to the kindness of Mr. Edward Kennedy.

76. Browne, Year, pp. 110-111. The italics are mine.

77. Some years ago, the government forbade this mining, and they are no longer being made.

78. Ghirshman, Iran, pp. 80 and 82. Some have been found also in Luristán. See No. 1350 in the Irán Bastán in Tehrán. Excavating at Level II of Necropolis B at Siyalk near Kashán, Professor Ghirshman came upon a number of pottery libation bowls with handles opposite a long, horizontal channel spout (Cf. Mongait, pp. 229-230). The material and shape would preclude putting names and dates inside (Plate II). For similar prehistoric bowls, see the Archæological Museum at Ankara; also Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete (Pelican ed., 1962), p. 155 and Plate 3; and S. Lloyd, Early Anatolia (Penguin ed., 1956), p. 107. Cf. Plate 30.

79. “Empty” is clearly a case of prolepsis; i.e., the glass, soon to be turned down, will then be empty.

80. Romance, p. 48ff.

81. Salámán, pp. 15 and 31.

82. Malcolm, II, 252.

83. Ibid., I, 90.

84. Ibid., I, 175-176.

85. Ibid., I, 209.

86. Ibid., I, 99.

87. Ouseley, II, 158 and 225.

88. Ibid., I, 246.

89. Ibid., I, 387 ff.

90. Ibid., III, 144 ff.

91. Ibid., I, 329.

92. Salámán, pp. 8-9.

93. Ibid., p. 12.

94. Romance, pp. 15-16.

95. Madras Service Army List, III, passim. The fact that England had just been Russia's ally against Napoleon may have made the Company hesitate to put into the official record the exact nature of some of these leaves. C. M. H. Burton Esq. of the India Office Records, Commonwealth Relations Office, London, kindly abstracted for me a summary of Major Hockley's military career.

96. Sálmán, p. 10.

97. Browne, Year, pp. 15, 315, 481.

98. Salámán, p. 13.

99. Possibly also No. 2 in the Preface and Nos. 36 and 42 (2nd ed.), which may have been written earlier.

100. See also J. W. Draper, “‘Umar and Pre-Islamic Persian Culture,” presently appearing in the Journal of the Faculty of Literature of the University of Tehrán.