Word: persianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Charles Laughton was off on a three-month tour reciting Shakespeare and the Bible. What should Elsa do with the time on her hands? A Hollywood promoter solved the problem for her. Last week, red-haired Elsa was making her first try as a chanteuse in the top-tab Persian Room of Manhattan's Plaza Hotel...
Last week sophisticated Persian Roomers, used to such glamorines as Hildegarde, were finding Elsa a little on the puzzling side. Following a polished dance team, she came coyly onstage looking, as she calls it, a little "tatty" in an artfully simple dress, her red curls all over her head. Her first song, about a blooming romance in a laundromat, was delivered in a saucy, off-key voice something like a boy soprano's. Then Elsa climbed on top of the grand piano to pitch a mildly off-color number called The Janitor's Boy. The audience liked some...
...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...
...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...
...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...