Word: fitzgerald
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Rubaiyat caught on quickly. But its translator still remained unknown. Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced this Rubaiyat to the U.S., showed it to crusty Historian Thomas Carlyle, remarking that it was rumored to be the work of a "Rev. Edward FitzGerald, who lived somewhere in Norfolk and spent much time in his boat." Cried Carlyle: "Why, he's no more Reverend than I am! He's a very old friend of mine . . . and [he] might have spent his time to much better purpose than in busying himself with the verses of that old Mohammedan blackguard...
...Utopian experiment consisted chiefly in following the Wordsworthian principles of "plain living and high thinking." Shunning his parents' wealthy house, FitzGerald rented a small cottage in Suffolk, where he lived for 16 years with a dog, a cat and a parrot. His staple diet was bread, fruit, cheese and fish, his recreations walking and sailing, his routine "of an even, grey-paper character." "He [lives]," complained one of his friends, "in a state of disgraceful indifference to everything, except grass and fresh air. . . . Half the self-sacrifice . . . the moral resolution, which he exercises . . . would amply furnish forth a martyr...
When his admirers called him "Philosopher" ("Diogenes without his dirt," said one), FitzGerald retorted that he had merely "a talent for dullness." He rose early, spent his mornings reading "old books" and doing occasional writing; in the afternoon he casually drew and painted. Evenings, he smoked, played the spinet, and entertained a few local callers. "Day follows day with unvaried movement," he declared; "there is the same level meadow with geese upon it always lying before my eyes: the same pollard oaks: with now and then the butcher or the washerwoman trundling...
Poetic Bowels. To his friends, "Old Fitz" was both a ruthlessly honest critic and a warmhearted patron. Tennyson, who was a proud man, as well as crotchety and hypochondriacal, readily accepted from FitzGerald unwavering criticism and hundreds of pounds. "This really great man," said FitzGerald, "thinks more about his bowels and nerves than about the Laureate wreath he was born to inherit." He was almost as observing about himself: "I know that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease; but ... I have not the strong inward call...
...when FitzGerald was 44, he published, at his own expense, his translation of six works by Spanish Playwright Calderon (which the Athenaeum considered "quite unnecessary to treat as a serious work"). Then a friend introduced him to what FitzGerald dubbed "the Sweetmeat, Childish, Oriental World" of the Persian language. Three years later, he braved the critics with a rendition of the Persian poem, Salaman and Absal...