Hudson’s main concern with Graves’ charge that Fitzgerald was a ‘dilettante faggot’ is that it makes the link between dilettantism and an abusive use of the labelling of queered sexualities in the twentieth century critical rejection of much of Victorian poetry. In all others (including different versions of the 1872 third edition) including the composited 5 th edition from which the Ali-Shah forgery was ultimately derived, it was stanza 19 as in Graves’ ‘translation’. In the first (1859) first edition, it was stanza 18. Only in the second edition of the Rubaiyat (1868) does Fitzgerald’s quatrain quoted here by Graves appear as stanza 24.
As I reread Graves in the light of Hudson’s argument for instance, I noticed that fact about the ordering might have been hinted at to a scholar by Graves comparison of Fitzgerald’s claimed stanza 24 and ‘our 19’. Moreover, this forgery was dependent entirely on Fitzgerald’s reordering of the quatrains.
The original manuscript provided to Graves by Ali-Shah turned out in the event to be an obvious forgery that any serious scholar might have noticed. Hudson points out that the numerous instances of such a critique support Graves view of Fitzgerald, spoken out more openly in contemporary press articles as a ‘dilettante faggot’. He is especially mocked for allowing rhyme to dictate and overwhelm any attempt to make sense to the point of using unnecessary ‘inversion’ and lazy subjectivity in an instance where the original, Graves insists, is merely using pithy argumentation. He is mocked for his failure to see the incongruency between Persian culture and that of the Western European obsession with Ancient Rome. The tone of this tells us more about how we are guided towards a disrespect for Fitzgerald as a poet and scholar. (1967) The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation with critical commentaries London, Cassell & Company Ltd. Nor, by the way, were Persians interested, as Fitzgerald pretends, in the sepulchres of Roman Caesars. Is sure to mark a king’s last resting-place. Here (stanza24) the rhyme red dictates the inversion, and ‘I sometimes think’ does not match the original (our 19):Įach rose or tulip bed that you encounter The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled I sometimes think that never blows so red Look for instance at the tone of part of Grave’s ‘assessment’: It was Graves waspish assessment of Fitzgerald that made me wish to write about what I admired in Fitzgerald on this reading and which Graves seemed to deliberately miss, focusing instead on Fitzgerald’s failure as a poet in being slavish, for instance to the original aaba rhyme scheme of the original quatrains or ruba’i, rather than inventive as a poet and committed to making sense. Of course, whether Fitzgerald’s is a ‘translation’ is itself a bone of contention, especially with Robert Graves, who prefers Fitzgerald’s ‘jocular word, ‘transmogrification’’. The other translations I mention include that of Robert Graves published in 1967, from a time in which I first became conscious of that poem. Having read the poem I found a Ph.D dissertation by Benjamin Hudson that more or less summed up my thoughts about reading it and other ‘translations’. Maybe I should ask myself whether they constitute something quite idle, something that merely spends or consumes time rather than making something of it. Now my blogs aren’t seen by me as processed primarily as work nor as ‘works’ that have a product life outside the reflections they spur in myself. Nevertheless I then find myself wanting to write up a blog on it. These domains of past work drive readings but now I read at relative leisure or, in a more severe self-assessment, comparative idleness. Perhaps because now I read it without any purposiveness or need, such as to write an essay as I did as a student or incorporate it into my teaching on Victorian literature as I did as an English lecturer. Reading Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam again now I am retired has seemed a great pleasure.
Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson, 1978.108.47 Available at: Elihu Vedder, (Illustration for Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) The Loquacious Vessels, 1883-1884, chalk, pencil, ink and watercolour on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Queering the need to work in works of art in Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I begin to have dreadful suspicions that this fruitless way of life is not looked upon by satisfaction by the open eyes above’. ‘For all which idle ease I think I must be damned. have always been very unmanly in my strivings to get things all compact and in good train’.
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