Customer Reviews

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Omar has contributed so many phrases to us that for the most part, people are unaware of their origin.
"Eat drink and be merry."
"The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. nor all thy piety, nor all thy wit, can lure it back to cancel half a line of it." Nothing ever written captures the inexorable one way march of time better than that single sentence by this master. But is it Fitzgerald, or is it Omar? What the hell... who cares?
Just wallow drunkenly in the rapture of his prose. Only Rumi approached this writing. But wait.. was it Barks, or was it Rumi? LOL.
Few books, excepting perhaps the Bible, have so many exquisitely crafted and picaresque sentences in them. A little tid bit from the book, unrelated to his prose:
The word Assassin, was associated with the life and times of Omar and two boy hood friends of his.
If you have not read this book, I envy you. You have before you, a stunning feast of prose by an unknown famous writer. Two of them. Omar and Fitzgerald. Although at one time Fitzgeralds star was burning bright.

My knowledge of the Rubiyat came from reading it in Poetry Anthologies .The hypnotic rhythms , the combination of life- philosophy and striking poetry seemed to naturally lead to the memorization of many stanzas.
There is the 'seize the day' enjoy life now, ' a jug of wine a loaf of bread and thou/ kind of hedonism. There is also a certain skeptical and realistic attitude which as I understand created problems for Omar Khayyam in a Muslim society.
How I wonder is this treasure of world - literature taken, or perhaps censored in the radical Islamic Iran of today.
In any case Fitzgerald's is one of the great translations of world- literature one of those cases, some experts say, in which the translation surpasses the original.
A poem to be enjoyed .

"We are no other than a moving row
of magic shadow shapes that come and go,
'round with the sun-illumined lantern held,
at midnight by the master of the show.

But pieces of the game he plays
upon this chequer-board of nights and days,
and hither and thither moves and checks and slays,
and one by one, back in the closet lays."

Khayyam's Rubaiyat is a great work of amateur philosophy, as well as being one of the literary greats of all time. It combines a deeply poetic, resounding tone with ideas and images so vivid and sophisticated that one has to admire the genius of the work. Khayyam's view of the world runs back and forth, from religious to agnostic to atheistic. His central thesis, though, remains the same, that man's time on earth is limited, and he should drink the wine of fulfillment while he can, before it's too late.

"The moving finger writes, and having writ,
not all thy piety nor wit,
can lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all thy tears can wash away a word of it."

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