Jansy:
I am prepared to modify my opinions (unlike some I could mention!) They
remain “strong,” but a tad less “steadfast.” My point about VN’s and
Borges’s credentials still stands. They are bound to rely on
the reliability of others more versed [sic] in early Persian
language/culture, just as most of us bow in awe to VN’s superior
knowledge of Pushkin’s early Russian, while noting that not every
“expert” shares that adulation ;=) Of course, the agony is that we
really remain outside the circle when the “experts” wrangle. (As the
cynics say, “If the experts agreed, we would need only one of them.”)
Alas, VN’s and Borges’s TRUST turned out to be MISPLACED. Not their
fault, because the sources were skilled and proficient FRAUDs who had
conned diverse experts over the years, including Graves. The plain
TRUTH*** is that whatever Omar Ali-Shah’s early-Persian-language
competence (I must take this on faith whereas I can personally vouch
for Graves’s English competence having read and
met him!), Omar and his dad (Ikbal Ali Shah) deliberately FORGED the
m/s claimed to be Khayyam’s original and LIED without shame to Graves.
This, in turn, MUST vitiate VN’s and Borges’s FAITH in Graves’s 1967
Rubaiyat.
VN found his “sentimental fondness” for FitzGerald’s (or FitzOmar as
he’s often called) version suddently shattered by the Graves’s “more
accurate” translation, but at the time Nabokov was unaware of the
emerging doubts (subsequently confirmed beyond doubt) that the project
was based on a HOAX (we know of the motives behind many similar
manglings of Khayyam’s text: pushing OK into the Sufi mystical camp).
But, was VN familiar with FitzOmar’s own “confessions” re-the nature of
his “translation” which he preferred to call a TRANSMOGRIFATION!
"My translation will interest you from its form, and also in many
respects in its detail: very unliteral as it is.
Many quatrains are mashed together: and something lost, I doubt, of
Omar's simplicity, which is so much a virtue in him" (letter to E. B.
Cowell, 9/3/58).
"I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation as
I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing
must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one
can’t retain the Original’s better. Better a live Sparrow than a
stuffed Eagle" (letter to E. B. Cowell, 4/27/59)
I have a feeling VN would have enjoyed this
anxious honesty.
It’s a huge, complex, fascinating topic, with much scope for sincere
disagreements. We now have hundreds of “renditions” in many languages.
(Borges’s dad did one in Spanish.) OK left several thousand quatrains,
not all of equal “authenticity.” See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam#Robert_Graves_and_Omar_Ali-Shah
Khayyam indeed was his trade: tent-making just like Paul of Tarsus.
My own speculations include OK’s contemporary: abu-Ja’far Mohammed
Ibn-Mu:sa al-Khuwa:rizmi (easy for me to say), the great Persian
mathematician (fl. CE 825), without whom, as we computer scientists
say. His pioneering, eponymous ALGORISMS (whence the quip: a pre-LISP
Algorithm) find an echo in one of my favorite quatrains:
For IS and IS-NOT though with Rule and Line,
And UP-and-DOWN by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom, I
Was never deep in anything but – Wine (Tetrasic 58)
***
Ikbal
Ali Shah was involved in the controversy surrounding the 1967
publication of a new translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, by his son
Omar Ali-Shah and the English poet Robert Graves.[5] The translation
was based on an annotated "crib", supposedly derived from an old
manuscript said to have been in the Shah family's possession for 800
years.[6] L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University,
and others who reviewed the book expressed their conviction that the
story of the ancient family manuscript was false.[5][6] Graves had been
led to believe that Ikbal Ali Shah had access to the disputed
manuscript and was about to produce it at the time of his death from a
car accident, to allay the growing controversy surrounding the
translation.[5] However, the manuscript never was produced.[5] The
scholarly consensus today is that the "Jan Fishan Khan" manuscript was
a hoax, and that the Graves/Shah translation was in fact based on a
Victorian amateur scholar's analysis of the sources used by previous
Rubaiyat translator Edward FitzGerald.[1][7][8][9]
Following the controversy, James Moore, in an article in Religion
Today (today the Journal of Contemporary Religion),
described the Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah as charming, personable, and a
teller of tall tales, who compensated for his failure at Medical
School, and his predictably ignominious treatment as a son-in-law, with
invented private conversations with King George V.[1] When he tried to
compromise P.M. Ramsay Macdonald, investigations by the Foreign Office
revealed, according to Moore, that there "was hardly a word of truth in
his writings".[1] Moore added that Ali Shah's conduct over a halal
meat scandal in Buenos Aires in 1946 caused the British ambassador to
describe him as a "swindler".[1]