Marina Warner writes:

The first version of the Rubáiyát ascribed to Omar Khayyám comprised 75 quatrains from a manuscript in the Bodleian which had been shown to FitzGerald by his younger friend Edward Byles Cowell. Cowell, a brilliant autodidact Orientalist, left to take up a Chair in History at the Presidency College in Calcutta in 1856, and after his departure the two wrote back and forth a stream of letters about minutiae of interpretation. Later, Cowell transcribed many more poems from another manuscript he found in the Asiatic Institute in Calcutta, and sent them on to FitzGerald. Just as he used scissors and paste on the new acquisitions for his picture gallery, so FitzGerald kept at his ‘dear old Khayyám’. In a letter he wrote that he wanted to render him into ‘tolerable English Music’. His vocabulary emphasises consonants, with full rhymes on Anglo-Saxon masculine endings and a strong preference for the quick tempo of the monosyllabic verb: strike and fling and blow and start and fret and stamp and drink – and more drink. The transformation of scattered Persian epigrams into a braided English sequence – ‘something of an Eclogue’, he called it – kept having to be redone, undone and done again. FitzGerald’s approach to translation consciously reprised Dryden’s idea of imitation, rather than paraphrase or word-for-word accuracy. But his imitations are also ‘overdrafts’, as Basil Bunting brilliantly entitled his experiments with Latin and Persian poets, perhaps with FitzGerald distantly in mind. To Cowell, FitzGerald wrote: ‘But at all Cost, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the Original’s better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.’

(LRB 9 April 2009)

Oxford | hardback 167 pp. |ISBN: 9780199542970