Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (جلالالدین محمد رومی),
died December 17th, 1273
Upon his death, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī,
(Whose poems never said a lot to me)
I find I must resort to rubáiyát
Upon this winter day, so cold and gloomy.
The scansions of the late Edward FitzGerald
(Omar Khayyám's perhaps unlikely herald)
Preserve the form of ancient Persian verse
In which the poet, his warm heart laid bare held
The words a student sets upon her dresser,
(With Leonard Cohen and Gibran), and, bless her,
Rūmī in several dubious translations,
By poets rarely greater, mostly lesser.
-
Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: December 17th, 2020 14:15
- Comment from author about the poem: On the occasion of the Rūmī’s death, observed today. The earlier Persian poet Omar Khayyám (1043-1131) was very loosely translated into English by Edward FitzGerald (1809-83). It’s remarkably difficult to find out what Rūmī’s poetry sounds like in the original Persian (Farsi). I think this YouTube gives some idea of it:\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\r\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\n https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7DbCt78gw
- Category: Unclassified
- Views: 23
Offline)
Comments3
Beautiful. Thank you. Have a Happy Holiday.
Please keep posting - I'll follow, or rather trail, far behind but still learn much in the process, I think.
Regards Dave
I'm just posting poems I wrote decades ago, but then I noticed that today was the anniversary of Rūmī's death, so I thought I'd see if MyPoeticSide would support the Arabic alphabet, and it does - I think WordPress must be solidly plugged into Unicode. So I wrote a poem to try that with. Next will probably be Devanāgarī (Sanskrit) - I've got a 1970s poem for that. Chinese will require another new poem. I'm having fun pushing the limits of MyPoeticSide's text editor.
Today's poem echoes - or rather parodies - the rime and meter of the Rubáiyát, a poem you're probably familiar with.
Well certainly not the Rubáiyát as such, but Edward FitzGerald of course - now hidden away somewhere in my bookcase.... That translation took on a life of its own!
I set to write an imitation of Edward FitzGerald's verse, and wound up with a burlesque. FitzGerald's "translation" indeed has a life of its own - it became one of the touchstones of the English poetic tradition - but people who can actually read medieval Farsi decry it. Robert Graves loathed it.
I have a totally independent German translation of Omar I bought in Germany in 1955. A good bit different. I'll see if I can find the book around the house today.
To be able to comment and rate this poem, you must be registered. Register here or if you are already registered, login here.