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Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát

Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát HERBERT F. TUCKER mong the many virtues of Christopher Decker's edition of the FitzGerald Rubáiyát is its patient elucidation, not only of the various circumstances surrounding the text's multiple versions, but of what we can infer about the translator's equally various attitude toward his work.1 Enthusiastic, torpid, apologetic, cavalier, across two decades and more between the first edition of 1859 and the final one of 1879 the anonymous agent who once signed himself in correspondence "Fitz-Omar" remains hard to read with assurance--by reason partly of a diffidence that was specific to the man's character, partly of ambivalences that haunt the translator's art generally.2 But amid this history of many shifts and much effacement, across the variorum Rubáiyát there emerges an unswerving commitment that goes far toward explaining the work's extraordinary appeal. I mean FitzGerald's commitment to interpreting Omar Khayyám's quatrains not mystically but--in a term of FitzGerald's that becomes intriguingly complex--literally. The apparatus to each version he authorized sets at defiance all "Pretence at divine Allegory" (1859, p. 6), all trafficking "in Allegory and Abstraction" (1868, p. 35), all "Spiritual" decoction of what "is simply the Juice of the Grape" (1872, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Victorian Poetry West Virginia University Press

Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát

Tucker, Herbert F.
Victorian Poetry , Volume 46 (1) – Jun 7, 2008
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Publisher
West Virginia University Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 West Virginia University
ISSN
1530-7190
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Abstract

Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald's Rubáiyát HERBERT F. TUCKER mong the many virtues of Christopher Decker's edition of the FitzGerald Rubáiyát is its patient elucidation, not only of the various circumstances surrounding the text's multiple versions, but of what we can infer about the translator's equally various attitude toward his work.1 Enthusiastic, torpid, apologetic, cavalier, across two decades and more between the first edition of 1859 and the final one of 1879 the anonymous agent who once signed himself in correspondence "Fitz-Omar" remains hard to read with assurance--by reason partly of a diffidence that was specific to the man's character, partly of ambivalences that haunt the translator's art generally.2 But amid this history of many shifts and much effacement, across the variorum Rubáiyát there emerges an unswerving commitment that goes far toward explaining the work's extraordinary appeal. I mean FitzGerald's commitment to interpreting Omar Khayyám's quatrains not mystically but--in a term of FitzGerald's that becomes intriguingly complex--literally. The apparatus to each version he authorized sets at defiance all "Pretence at divine Allegory" (1859, p. 6), all trafficking "in Allegory and Abstraction" (1868, p. 35), all "Spiritual" decoction of what "is simply the Juice of the Grape" (1872,

Journal

Victorian Poetry – West Virginia University Press

Published: Jun 7, 2008

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