Books: The Persian or the Scholar?

Arthur John Arberry, Cambridge University professor of Arabic and authority on Persian, is a plump and hearty gentleman with a stiff black mustache who long ago made up his mind about one thing. “Every scholar of Persian,” he once wrote, “firmly resolves, quite early in his career, that whatever other temptation he may yield to in the course of his alluring adventures, he will never be drawn into the Omar Khayyám controversy . . .” By last week, Professor Arthur Arberry, 45, had found himself not only drawn into the controversy, but practically the center of it.

The controversy had its beginnings in 1856, when eccentric Scholar Edward FitzGerald got his first look at a copy of a 400-year-old manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. He began translating the quatrains of the forgotten Persian astronomer-poet, Omar Khayyám. In a short time, FitzGerald’s translations swept into vogue, and the Rubáiyát’s call to “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” became a literary contagion.

The Moving Finger. Victorian ladies sneaked the poems upstairs and hid them under their pillows. Lovers read them aloud, and young men quoted sadly that “The Moving Finger Writes; and, having writ, Moves on . . .” Far into the 20th Century, the contagion persisted, and Journalist-Historian Mark Sullivan, in Our Times, felt himself obliged to record that Omar’s bibulous philosophy had had the “effect of sapping and undermining” U.S. morals.

Meanwhile, scholars were having their own troubles. As they rummaged about for other Omar poems, they uncovered so many that it began to seem impossible that Omar could have written them all. Some quatrains were also attributed to other poets, and scholars began to conclude that Omar was just a convenient name on which to pin any wine-colored quatrains that turned up. As for the Rubáiy5ádt, scholars also had doubts: Was Omar a really good poet, or had FitzGerald merely made him seem so?

“There It Was.” Until 1947, Arthur Arberry kept himself clear of all this. Then one day a wealthy collector brought him a slim, yellowed volume of Persian poetry. Sure enough, reported Arberry, “There it was … the oldest copy of Omar Khayyám’s poems hitherto discovered … The celebrated [Bodleian] codex had been bettered by exactly two centuries . . . This was more than human curiosity could resist.”

The professor set to work, gave the quatrains a literal translation (the manuscript contained 172 of them), and published them in a small (400 copies) deluxe edition. But no sooner had he completed the task than a Persian book dealer came all the way from Teheran to see him with a browned and ancient sheaf of papers. Arberry recognised that this Rubáiyát was older still. It had been copied out only 75 years after Omar’s death, contained 252 quatrains.

“These Simple Things.” Last week Professor Arberry finished a new translation, this time putting the quatrains into verse. When the Arberry Rubdiydt finally appears, connoisseurs will find the old Omar quite changed. For Quatrain No. 1 (“Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight / The Stars before him from the Field of Night. . .”), readers will find:

The sun has cast the noose of morn

Athwart the rooftop of the world;

The emperor of day has hurled

His head, our goblet to adorn . . .

For the familiar “Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread . . .” Arberry writes:

These simple things if they be mine—

A loaf, the purest heart of wheat,

A thigh of lamb to be my meat,

For thirst a flagon of good wine;

And if, to cheer my wilderness,

A maid refusing not my kiss,

That were a life of perfect bliss

No throned sultan can possess.

As for “The Moving Finger . . .” it no longer shows up at all.

To Professor Arberry’s way of thinking, the new verses will show more thoroughly than ever before what extraordinary liberties FitzGerald took with Omar—”numerous infidelities of interpretation which go beyond the generous margin of poetic paraphrase FitzGerald allowed himself . . . infidelities that err against the very spirit of the original … Of the two, Omar and FitzGerald, if I have to choose between them, I do not doubt that the Persian was the greater poet and the greater man.”

That left a legion of FitzGerald admirers still to be heard from.