Rubaiyat Commentary
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Oft-repeated Thoughts
It is possible to get badly battered by oft-repeated thoughts that cause some melting in the mind, muddles it too, or bury better purpose, says Yogananda. Health and successful living also depend on sane thoughts and actions and good company. And whereas some books are called good company, a lot of books are not. [Yi 45; Mae 35]Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) initially employed a Persian scholar to help him translate the original into English, but, "After I compared that translation with FitzGerald's, I realized that FitzGerald had been divinely inspired to catch exactly in gloriously musical English words the soul of Omar's writings." [From an article in Hinduism Today, October 1994]
"The soul of Omar's writings" - well. Yogananda's claim of finding Omar's real meanings in FitzGerald's work should not go completely unchecked. We should mind the basics:
In translating Omar Khayyam, his method was to transmit the essence of the poet's mood and thought, often in his own imagery. [Encyclopaedia Britannica [Ebu sv. "Edward FitzGerald"].Edward FitzGerald's (1809-83) "translation was so free in its rendition as to be virtually an original work." Further, he was not very well versed in Persian either.
Best known for his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which, though it is a free adaptation and selection from the 12th-century Persian poet's verses, stands on its own as a classic of English literature. It is one of the most frequently quoted of lyric poems. [Ebu, sv "Rubaiyat"]However:
Some scholars have doubted that Omar wrote poetry. His contemporaries took no notice of his verse, and not until two centuries after his death did a few quatrains appear under his name. Even then, the verses were mostly used as quotations against particular views ostensibly held by Omar, leading some scholars to suspect that they may have been invented and attributed to Omar because of his scholarly reputation. [Ebu, sv "Omar Khayyam"].The encyclopedia also tells of "FitzGerald's ingenious and felicitous paraphrasing" and "His translations . . . are, however, extremely free translations, and more recently several more faithful renderings of the quatrains have been published [Ibid.]."
Yogananda used the subjective renditions of FitzGerald to tell what the Medieval Persian Omar Khayyam allegedly meant, but Yogananda's output in the matter is rather foot-loose.
The Whinfield translation and the work of Graves-Shah to Compare With
Yogananda's purport and Rubaiyat comments have been investigated on the previous page.What could be at stake for ourselves here is growth into (more) maturity, which can be stunted by much servility even in the face of a flop marked by highly idiosyncratic and tendentious procedures, unsustained interpretations and "spiritualised misinterpretations".
Against such failures, judiciousness and mature methods of presentation can assist relevant learning.
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Literature
Ebu: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2008.
Mae: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Man's Eternal Quest. New ed. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1986.
Yi: Yogananda, Paramahansa. The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita: An Introduction to India's Universal Science of God-realization. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 2007.
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