Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
In celebration of the UN World Poetry Day, March 21
Dr Abe V Rotor
Living with Nature - School on Blog [avrotor.blogspot.com]
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid (People's School-on-Air) with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM, [www.pbs.gov.ph] 8-9 evening class Monday to Friday
Dr Abe V Rotor
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
is the title that Edward Fitzgerald gave to his translation of a
selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are
about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), a Persian
poet, mathematician, and astronomer.
A Persian ruba'i
is a two line stanza with two parts (or hemistechs) per line, hence the
word "Rubaiyat", (derived from the Arabic root word for 4), meaning
"quatrains".
Perhaps the most famous of FitzGerald's verses is this one,
Quatrain XI in his 1st edition:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
Quatrain XII in his 5th edition:
"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"
The
following are several samples of Fitzgerald's translation, concluding
with another well-known verse (Fitzgerald's quatrain LI in his 1st
edition):
Some for the pleasures here below
Others yearn for The Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum
And much as Wine has played the Infidel
And robbed me of my robe of Honour, well ...
I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell
For some we loved, the loveliest and best
That from His rolling vintage Time has pressed,
Have drunk their glass a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest
But helpless pieces in the game He plays
Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days
He hither and thither moves, and checks ... and slays
Then one by one, back in the Closet lays
"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
Edward
Fitzgerald versions. The translations that are best known in English
are those of about a hundred of the verses by Edward FitzGerald
(1809–1883).
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