For whatever reason, however, Omar, as before said, has never been popular in his own country, and therefore has been but scantily transmitted abroad. The manuscripts of his poems, mutilated beyond the average casualties of Oriental transcription, are so rare in the East as scarce to have reached Westward at all, in spite of all the acquisitions of arms and science. There is no copy at the India House, none at the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. We know but one in England: No. 140 of the Ouseley manuscripts at the Bodleian, written at Shiráz, AD 1460. This contains but 158 rubáiyát. One in the Asiatic Society’s Library at Calcutta (of which we have a copy) contains (and yet incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all kinds of repetition and corruption. So Von Hammer speaks of his copy as containing about 200, while Dr. Sprenger catalogues the Lucknow manuscripts at double that number. The scribes, too, of the Oxford and Calcutta manuscripts seem to do their work under a sort of protest; each beginning with a tetrastich (whether genuine or not) taken out of its alphabetical order; the Oxford with one of apology; the Calcutta with one of expostulation, supposed (says a notice prefixed to the manuscript) to have arisen from a dream, in which Omar’s mother asked about his future fate. It may be rendered thus:—
“Oh Thou who burn’st in Heart for those who burn
In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying, ‘Mercy on them, God!’
Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?”
The Bodleian Quatrain pleads pantheism by way of justification.
“If I myself upon a looser Creed
Have loosely strung the Jewel of Good deed,
Let this one thing for my Atonement plead:
That One for Two I never did misread.”
The reviewer to whom I owe the particulars of Omar’s life concludes his review by comparing him with Lucretius, both as to natural remper and genius, and as acted upon by the circumstances in which he lived. Both indeed were men of subtle, strong, and cultivated intellect, fine imagination, and hearts passionate for truth and justice; who justly revolted from their country’s false religion, and false, or foolish, devotion to it; but who fell short of replacing what they subverted by such better hope as others, with no better revelation to guide them, had yet made a law to themselves. Lucretius indeed, with such material as Epicurus furnished, satisfied himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed and acting by a law that implied no legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of attitude, sat down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the universe which he was part actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime description of the Roman theatre) discolored with the lurid reflex of the curtain suspended between the spectator and the sun. Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated system as resulted in nothing but hopeless necessity, flung his own genius and learning with a bitter or humorous jest into the general ruin which their insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and, pretending sensual pleasure, as the serious purpose of life, only diverted himself with speculative problems of deity, destiny, matter and spirit, good and evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down, and the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last!
With regard to the present translation. The original rubáiyát (as, missing an Arabic guttural, these tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent stanzas, consisting each of four lines of equal though varied prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here imitated) the third line a blank. Somewhat as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the wave that falls over in the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental verse, the rubáiyát follow one another according to alphabetic rhyme—a strange succession of grave and gay. Those here selected are strung into something of an eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the “drink and make-merry,” which (genuine or not) recurs over-frequently in the original. Either way, the result is sad enough: saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry: more apt to move sorrow than anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavoring to unshackle his steps from destiny, and to catch some authentic glimpse of tomorrow, fell back upon today (which has outlasted so many tomorrows!) as the only ground he had got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his feet.
While the second edition of this version of Omar was preparing, Monsieur Nicolas, French Consul at Resht, published a very careful and very good edition of the text from a lithograph copy at Tehran, comprising 464 rubáiyát, with translation and notes of his own.
Monsieur Nicolas, whose edition has reminded me of several things, and instructed me in others, does not consider Omar to be the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine, Wine-bearer, etc., as Háfiz is supposed to do; in short, a Súfi poet like Háfiz and the rest.
I cannot see reason to alter my opinion, formed as it was more than a dozen years ago when Omar was first shown me by one to whom I am indebted for all I know of Oriental, and very much of other, literature. He admired Omar’s genius so much that he would gladly have adopted any such interpretation of his meaning as M. Nicolas’ if he could. That he could not, appears
