Word: omar
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...titillate the thousands who assembled outside Broadway's Criterion Theater for the benefit premiere of Funny Girl, the movie musical of the life of Fanny Brice. George Segal showed up in a double-breasted Nehru jacket, Rod Steiger in a black shirt with gold medallion, and Leading Man Omar Sharif in an old-fashioned tuxedo with wide peaked lapels. But all oohs and ahs were for the star of the spectacle, Brooklyn's own Barbra Streisand, who said: "I feel like a kid with a plaything...
...ORIGINAL RUBAIYYAT OF OMAR KHAYAAM, translated by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah. 86 pages. Doubleday...
FitzGerald, a mid-Victorian belletrist and amateur Orientalist, carried this principle to an extreme when he translated the 12th century Persian poem The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam. He condensed, combined and reshuffled the stanzas, dropping what did not suit him and pumping in generous transfusions of his own sentimental, post-Darwin fatalism. The result is one of the enduring minor poems of the language-awash with fanciful exoticism, vivid and resonant. But scholars have been scandalized by the liberties that FitzGerald took with the original, and for a century have tried in vain to supplant his version with more literal...
...present-day writer seems likely to succeed at smashing the "Fitz-Omar cult," it is Robert Graves. At 72, he is established as a leading British poet, an adroit translator and an iconoclastic critic and scholar. He does not read Persian, but worked from an annotated crib prepared for him by Persian Poet Omar Ali-Shah, who claims that the manuscript has been in his family for 800 years. Yet this new Rubaiyyat suffers from Graves's apparent inability to decide whether he was writing more as a translator or as a poet. He may well have failed...
Graves is plain where FitzGerald is prettified, philosophic where FitzGerald is sententious. His austere tone evokes a more troubled, yearning Omar whose tippling is a metaphor for religious mysticism. Yet, surprisingly for a poet of his skill and grace, Graves often lapses into ungainly syntax, primly avoids rhymes, and altogether misses the colorful, melodious murmur that so entrances the ear and emotions in FitzGerald. He may be deliberately exercising his classical restraint or making an overzealous try for accuracy. In any case, he stiffens the flow of the poem. Here is one of FitzGerald's best-known quatrains...