A MEETING OF EAST AND WEST.

Otago Witness, Issue 3853, 17 January 1928, Page 74

A MEETING OF EAST AND WEST.

When Fitzgerald with his translation of Omar Khayyam had brought Persia close to every Englishman’s heart, the thought did not cross hi s mind that a Persian scholar would amply repav the debt by rendering Shakespeare into Persian (says Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah in John o London s Weekly). The present Persian Minister at the Court of St. James’s, who has just arrived in London, is that scholar upon whose brow rests the honour of paying the cultural tribute of Persia by giving the Persian-speaking peoples a masterly translation of Shakespeare—that greatest singer known in English literary history. J

But why should a Persian, loving Omar as only a Persian can, select Shakespeare for rendering into his language? The explanation is simple. The philosophy of great art is one and the same in all climes and all ages, as can be well attested by comparison of the ideas underlying the work of the world’s chief poets. Thus, their distant periods and environments notwithstanding, the resemblance between the philosophies of William Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam is neither superficial nor fortuitous, but arises out. of that deep and almost supernatural instinct which hag always been the concomitant of poetic genius of the first rank Indeed, the mental likeness between Omar and the Bard of Avon can be substantiated bv scores of passages a *rm >s *' identical in thought and sentiment. The central idea animating both of these masters of though and verse is indeed, the impermanence of humanity its evanescent and temporal character. Man is the sport of grim and relentless Fates who treat him as a puppet, an image to beth en f° r the,r p,easure - S *ys Mn <?- 3 b u t a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon t»he stage And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. imything be closer in thought to the first part of this than a quotation from "The Rubaiyat —

For in and out, above, about, below, "ils notning but a Magic Shadow-sliow, Play’d in a Box whose candle is the sun, Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

Man is indeed clay, mere earth, say both the Eastern and the Western singers in their deeper notes of despondency.

Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might Stop a hole to keep the wind away, says Shakespeare, and again and again Omar refers to man’s earthy origin.

But there is a solvent for man’s woes and sorrows—wine, the ''grape.

Go, suck the subtle blood o’ the grape, Till the high fever seethe your blood to froth, And so ’scape hanging; ’ trust not the physician,says Timon of Athens to the thieves. And Timon has a peculiar affinity with Omar. He prefers “ the desert to the sown,” he espies the folly that lurks in all things worldly, even if he is by no means so sadly jovial as the Persian philosopher or anti-philosopher. And here we have the likeness between Shakespeare and Omar well defined. Both are indeed anti-philosophers, unfriends to all systems of conventional thought.

And who is more like Omar than Falstaff, the drinker with the thinker’s brain, the Bacchus with the mind of a Rabelais? “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned.”

Wisdom is, indeed, the constant butt of both poets. Says Omar in a wellknown quatrain:— Why, all the saints and sages who discussed Of the two worlds so learnedly, are thrust Like foolish prophets forth, their words to

scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stont with dust. Which is practically what Shakespeare exclaims when he writes: —

There is enough written upon this earth To stir a mutiny in the mildest thought And arm the minds of infants to exclaim. But it is not so much in word or phrase, but in general tendency of thought and spirit that Omar and Shakespeare are akin. Indeed, Omar’s notion that the world is a mere puppet-show and that all that is beautiful within it must at length come to an end is echoed in Shakespeare’s lines:—

Golden lads and girls all must, Like chimney-sweepers come to dust. * * *

Perhaps the circumstances of life in the times and environments in which Shakespeare and Omar lived may have given them a similar outlook. At the Persian Court, as at that of Elizabeth, gross favouritism -was rife, vice was enthroned in high social • circles, and “ patient merit ” was ignored. Perhaps this sufficed to make these poets disgusted with mundane affairs regarding them as paltry and undistinguished. But, be that as it may, Shakespeare in a manner partly enfranchised himself from this crude and anarchical -philosophy, although he never seems altogether to have outsoared it. Rarely does he display that whole-souled. and fervent trust in the Almighty cause of all things which Goethe, Dante,, and Chaucer constantly exhibit. Omar, on the other hand, runs the whole gamut of blasphemy, and recks not, convinced that Fate is a blundering demon, and that no wisdom inspires the first cause. If Shakespeare hints more than occasionally at some such state of things, and even savs so now and again, he still hesitates'a doubt. And a doubt in his world was equal to wholesale renunciation in ours. Yes, Omar and Shakespeare have indeed nr_ch in common. Like Hamlet, Omar is more than a little “mad.”