THE ENIGMA OF EDWARD FITZGERALD

A man, Umar ben Ibrahim, is born in Persia in the eleventh century of the Christian era (for him, the fifth century of the Mohammedan Hegira), and learns the Koran and Tradition from Hassan ben Sabbah, future founder of the sect of Hashishin or Assassins, and from Nizam ul-Mulk, who is to become vizier of Alp Arslan, and conquerer of the Caucasus. Half-seriously, half in jest, the three friends swear that if some day good fortune favors one of them, the lucky one will not forget the others. In his crowning years, Nizam achieves the rank of vizier. Umar asks him for nothing more than a corner in the shade of his good fortune from which to pray for the well-being of his friend and to meditate on mathematics. (Hassan asks for and obtains a high post and, at last, has the vizier stabbed to death.) Umar receives from the treasury of Nishapur an annual pension of ten thousand dinars and is able to devote himself to his studies. He forswears astrology, but takes up astronomy, collaborating in the reform of the calendar sponsored by the sultan and composing a famous treatise on algebra which provides numerical solutions for equations of the first and second degree, and geometrical solutions, by means of intersecting cones, for those of the third. The mysteries of number and the stars do not exhaust his attention; he reads, in the solitude of his library, the texts of Plotinus, who, in the vocabulary of Islam, is the Egyptian Plato or the Greek Master, and the fifty-odd epistles of the heretical and mystical Encyclopedia of the Brothers of Purity, in which it is reasoned that the universe is an emanation of Unity, and will return to Unity. . . . He is regarded as a proselyte of Alfarabi, who believed that universal forms do not exist apart from things, and of Avicenna, who taught that the world is everlasting. One account of him informs us that he believes, or makes a show of believing, in the transmigrations of the soul, from human to animal body, and on one occasion spoke with an ass, as Pythagoras spoke with a dog. He is an atheist, but is well able to interpret in the orthodox manner the most exacting passages of the Koran, since every cultured man is a theologian, and since, in order to be one, faith is not indispensable. In the intervals between astronomy, algebra, and apologetics, Umar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami works on verse compositions of four lines, of which the first, the second, and the last are rhymed; the most extensive manuscript attributes to him five hundred of these quatrains, a number scant enough to do disservice to his fame, since in Persia (as in the Spain of Lope and Calderón), the poet must be prolific. In the year 517 of the Hegira, Umar is reading a treatise entitled The One and the Many; a malaise or a premonition interrupts him. He gets up, marks the page which his eyes will not see again, and makes his peace with God, with that God which may or may not exist and whose favor he has asked for in the difficult pages of his algebra. He dies that same day, at the hour of the setting of the sun. Around that time, on an occidental island to the north, unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who has defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.

Seven centuries flow past, with their lusters, their agonies and their mutations; and in England, a man, FitzGerald, is born, less of an intellect than Umar, but perhaps more sensitive, more wistful. FitzGerald is aware that literature is his true destiny, and pursues it with indolence and tenacity. Over and over again he reads Don Quixote, which seems to him almost the greatest of books (he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and “dear old Virgil") and his passion embraces the dictionary in which he looks up words. He realizes that every man who has some music in his soul can make verses ten or a dozen times in his life if the stars are propitious, but he does not propose to abuse this modest gift. He is the friend of famous people (Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray), and feels himself in no way inferior to them, despite his modesty and courtesy. He has published a gracefully written dialogue, Euphranor, and indifferent versions of Calderon and the great Greek tragedies. From the study of Spanish, he has gone on to Persian, and has begun a translation of Mantiq al-Tayr, that mystical epic about the birds who search for their king, Simurg, and finally arrive at his palace, which is across the seven seas, to discover that they are Simurg and that Simurg is each and every one of them. Around 1854, he is lent a manuscript collection of Umar's compositions, the verses put together with no other organization than the alphabetical order of their rhymes; FitzGerald puts some of them into Latin, and glimpses the possibility of turning them into a continuous, organically coherent book, beginning with the images of morning, the rose and the nightingale, and ending with those of night and the tomb. To this improbable and farfetched end, FitzGerald dedicates his life, that of an indolent, solitary, and monomaniacal man. In 1859, he publishes a first version of the Rubáiyát, which is followed by others, rich in variations and refinements. A miracle happens: from the lucky conjunction of a Persian astronomer who ventures into poetry and an English eccentric who explores Spanish and Oriental texts, without understanding them entirely, emerges an extraordinary poet who resembles neither of them. Swinburne writes that FitzGerald “has given to Omar Khayydm a permanent place among the major English poets,” and Chesterton, aware of the mixture of romanticism and classicism in this extraordinary work, observes that it possesses at the same time “an elusive melody and a lasting message.” Some critics take FitzGerald's Omar as an English poem with Persian allusions; FitzGerald interpolated, refined and invented, but his Rubáiyát seems, to us readers, to be both ancient and Persian.

The case calls for conjecture of a metaphysical nature. Umar, as we know, professed the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine of the transition of the soul through many incarnations; with the passing of the centuries, his soul possibly found its reincarnation in England to fulfill, in a remote Germanic language with Latin overtones, the literary destiny that in Nishapur had been pushed aside by mathematics. Isaac Luria the Lion demonstrated that the soul of a dead man can enter the lost spirit of another to maintain or instruct him. Perhaps the spirit of Umar lodged, around 1857, in FitzGerald's. In the Rubáiyát, we read that the history of the universe is a spectacle which God conceives, stages, and then contemplates; this speculation (the technical name for it is pantheism) would permit us to believe that the Englishman could have re-created the Persian, since both were, in essence, God, or momentary faces of God.

More probable, and no less marvelous than these almost supernatural conjectures, is the assumption of a benevolent destiny. At times, the clouds take the shape of mountains or lions; by analogy, the wistfulness of Edward FitzGerald, and a manuscript on yellowing paper, in purple characters, forgotten in a vault of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, assume, for the good of us all, the shape of the poem.

Any collaboration is mysterious. This one, of an Englishman and a Persian, was more so than any other, because the two were very different, and in life might not have achieved friendship; it was death and vicissitude and time that brought it about that one should know of the other and both become a single poet.

—Translated by ALASTAIR REID