MORE OMAR KHAYYAM.

Evening Star, Issue 19375, 8 October 1926, Page 6

MORE OMAR KHAYYAM.

The discovery in Sind, Western India, of a manuscript containing more quatrains o£ Omar Khayyam may moan more to antiquarians and to those who delight in worrying a cult to death than to true lovers of literature. Omar was horn in Persia about the middle of the eleventh century, and took his more distinctive name, wdiich moans tentmaker, from his father’s calling. In addition to holding independent view’s in religion, ho was a good deal of a mathematician and astronomer, assisting in a reform of the calendar, the result of w’hich, according to Gibbon, surpasses the Julian and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.” In his later years he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and he died in 1122 at Nishapur, where the north wind, as he predicted, still scatters roses on his tomb. His poems were known only by » few current quotations in Europe until Edward Fitzgerald, the friend of lennyson and Carlyle, found them in Persian in the Bodleian Library, and produced the translation of them which was called by Tennyson “ a planet equal to the sun which casfit.” .Other

authorities have thought L even better than that. To quote one of them, it is “so infinitely finer than the original that tho value of the latter is such mainly as attaches to Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s prototypes.” Many translation of Omar have been since produced,. but none of them so “ divinely well,” and new original quatrains have been discovered from time to time. A few-week, ago we published a report of one that had been discovered in an Arab manuscript, about which no inconsiderable fuss was being made. “ That Omar should be quoted and referred to by name by a writer of the thirteenth century is evidence,” we were toM, ‘‘that the new verse actually was written by Omar himself.” Yet wo have known quite recent verses, in our own time, that have been wrongly ascribed. Part of the importance of the latest discovery has been found in the fact that “it was not known previously that Omar visited Sind.” The supposition is apparently unthinkable,-in such a connection, that someone else might have carried the verses there. The "erse quoted from the latest discovery is not typical of the Rubaiyat as we know it. The fact is that more Omar versos are not needed to enrich cither the world’s poetry or its philosophy. Fitzgerald had enough of them for his poem. Apart from the sweetness'and conciseness which he gave to the language of the argument, it is n cheerless, poor philosophy which we find in the Rubaiyat. Carlyle’s disgust with his friend’s “ Mohammedan blackguard ” is at least ns intelligible as tho enthusiasm of those for whom no amount of Omar is too much. A now Fitzgerald would he a real discovery,. if it .could ho made.