W.G. Sebald on Khayyám´s Rubáiyát

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (1859) 

Taken from Sebald´s "The Rings of Saturn"

The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvellous rendering of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity acorss a distance of eight centuries. FitzGerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of two hundred and twenty-four lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the medieval orient and the fading occident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history. For in and out, above, about, below, / ’Tis nothing but magic Shadow-Show, / play’d in a Box Whose Candle is the Sun, / Round which the Phantom figures come and go. The Rubaiyat was published in 1859, and it was also in that year that William Browne, who probably meant more to FitzGerald than anyone else on earth, died a painful death from serious injuries sustained in a hunting accident. – (pg.200/1)

Source: The Public Domain Review