"come, mr. tallyman, tally me bananas / daylight come and me want to go home"

[larryhammer]

Further dispatches from the frontiers of intellectual archeology.

I wasn't surprised to see Project Gutenberg has multiple editions of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I mean, it's still popular enough today that it still hasn't been displaced as the go-to translation, even though it has even less relationship to its original than Pope's Iliad. As English versification, it's not half bad, and the sentiments are strikingly consonant with those parts of Victorian culture still current in the bourgeois Anglosphere.

However, I did not expect Gutenberg to also have:

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr.
Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne
Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam
Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten
Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers
Rubáiyát of a Bachelor
Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband
Rubáiyát of Bridge
Golfer's Rubaiyat

Many of these parodies are rather dire, if anyone happens to be looking for some very bad poetry to gnaw on. But it only goes to show that I have been underestimating just how popular FitzGerald was. Being quoted in Bugs Bunny cartoons is one thing -- this list, another level entirely.

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

...not to mention Rocky & Bullwinkle.

There's a nice Litt. thesis here, although it's probably already been done.

The drawings in the Kitten book are charming. Including them in thesis would guarantee an easy pass; as XKCD observed, everyone's brain shuts down when there's a kitty.

[larryhammer]

The illos in the Kitten book are indeed charming. Better than the verse, at any rate.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

The drawing in the one in which the kitten is thinking about tipping the ink over appears to be the same drawing of the kitten that is the illustration itself (in other words, meta). Just going by the pose.

As for the verse, come now! The quatrain about the empty food bowl is a masterpiece of succinct Realism.

Note that the kitten has a nose. This was drawn before Persians were maimed by crazy breeders.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that about the Kitten! I'm very fond of that book, though frustrated by it's un-quote-ability.

What is a good translation?

[larryhammer]

You're right, about the meta illustration -- I hadn't noticed that. And since the author is also illustrator, it invites us to assume the cat is his neighbor's.

Indeed, about a nose. A prettier Persian than what one sees today.

---L.

[larryhammer]

I don't have a good answer for that, and I wouldn't mind having one. I've met a few over the years, but none impressed me for the quality of their English verse, and some were awkward enough to give one no reason to think the original was particularly good poetry.

---L.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Back when I formatted and downloaded the Rubaiyat from PG to my iPod, I looked in on one or two of the parody versions. But the bird was on the wing, so I resumed my normal pursuits.

The Rubaiyat, however, was indeed that huge a cultural event, and because of FitzGerald's edition. I've read that he gave a shape and poignancy to the verses that's not as much in the original. At any rate, students conversed in references, and communicated in verses from the work. It was #1 with a bullet.

[larryhammer]

And even so, FitzGerald's took a while to catch on -- wasn't it Rossetti who found a copy in a remainder bin and promoted it by word of mouth?

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

He was a pretty big hit in Boston, as I recall.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

That sounds right, at least it accords with the anecdotes I've heard.

Wasn't it FitzGerald who translated all of "The Scented Garden," working feverishly on his deathbed to finish what he regarded as his life's work, and died satisfied — after which his very religious wife looked at it, was shocked, and burned the whole thing?

[larryhammer]

Hadn't heard of that -- I was under the impression his last work, not yet published at his death, was a version of "The Parliament of Birds".

---L.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Oops. I just searched it out, and it was Sir Richard Burton, who also had a hand in The Thousand and One Nights and Kama Sutra.

Ironically, he intended it to be published after his death to support his widow, and to show his defiance of social mores.

[larryhammer]

Burton sounds more like it.

---L.