Word: rubaiyyat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Graves's more dignified Rubaiyyat may be an eagle to FitzGerald's sparrow. But FitzGerald's work is still in living flight, while Graves's already sits there on the shelf-stuffed...
...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...
...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 as both...
...that the manuscript used by Ali-Shah and Graves was "a clumsy forgery." Replied Graves: "Howling nonsense." The quarrel may never be resolved, since Graves's critics have not been permitted to examine Ali-Shah's manuscript. Thus the lay reader can only read Graves's Rubaiyyat as an English poem and decide whether it speaks for itself...
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