Did FitzGerald turn Khayyam into an Epicurean, or was he one already?
Its coordinates: 5.8 Philosophy of Music and Literature
Everyone's grandfather here can recite some Khayyam. In English, everyone's grandfather could recite FitzGerald, which is not quite the same thing.
FitzGerald's version (fifth edition, stanza XXIV; both the first and fifth editions are on Project Gutenberg) reads like a Roman poem:
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!
That is Lucretius in tone: death is the end, so take the day. And yet:
- Many quatrains attributed to Khayyam were probably not written by him, and scholars have argued for more than a century about which are genuine.
- Some Sufi readers take the wine as divine love and the tavern as the place where the self is surrendered.
- FitzGerald arranged his quatrains into a sequence, from dawn to nightfall, that the Persian collections do not have.
My question is not "what did Khayyam really mean", which may have no answer. It is this: when a translation builds a philosophy out of scattered poems, whose philosophy is it? And is the Epicurean reading wrong, or just one of several the poems allow?