MR. McCARTHY'S " OMAR KHAYYAM."
IF this book were the work of a very young writer, we should forgive its affectations and conceits, in the belief that they only came of a mistaken but not unworthy desire to follow in the steps of the great masters of former generations, and that more experience would teach him to distinguish the permanent forms of the English language which are for all time, from those which are only good for their own day, and would drop off in succession like the yearly leaves on a great oak. But when the writer claims to be a man of mature intellect and culture, acquainted with many lands and many people, we are justly irritated by such affectations and conceits. It is very creditable to a man to learn Persian, though he be not accredited to the Court of the Shah or of any Indian Prince ; and since this language, easy as it is, is no longer as familiar to all educated Anglo-Indians as it was from the days of Warren Hastings to those of Mountstuart Elphinstone, little vanity may be pardoned in the Englishman who can boast such knowledge. But was it necessary or becoming to make the boast in such high-flown phrases as the following P-
" From the Omar of Fitzgerald's incomparable verse to Omar himself, the real Omar in his native Persian, was a step, but a hard step. I plunged into Persian for Omar's sake ; I struggled with the strange script of the East; I became possessed of Mr. Whinfield's edition first, then of Nicolas's, the one accom- panied by a rendering in English verse, the other by a translation in French prose. With these, in such leisure as I could find, and at long intervals, I grappled. My Persian of to-day is at the best but beggarly, but such as it is, it has given me infinite pleasure."
All this means no more than that the writer has learnt Persian, and enjoys it, as other men have done before him, though, like Dogberry's well-favoured man, they have given thanks and made no boast of it. But this grandiloquence is not all. Not
content with calling Persian writing " the strange script of the East," the whole book, from the title on the cover to the last page, is printed in the still more strange and disagreeable " script" which printers call " small caps.," and which makes
• Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Translated by Justin Halal). McCarthy, M.P. London: Dared Nutt. 1889.
the book look as if it were in type-writing of the earlier and leas readable kind. The effect of this intolerable affectation on our eyes and temper is, we confess, such that we find it difficult to do justice to the substance of the translations and the introduction to them.
Omar, surnamed Khayyam, or " the tent-maker," was a Persian astronomer and mathematician of so much eminence that Gibbon (as quoted by Mr. Fitzgerald) says that the reformed calendar, in framing which Omar was employed, was " a com- putation of time which surpasses the Julian and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style." His honour as a man of science seems to have been always greater in his own country than as a poet ; and it was so in Europe also till he became known through the translations of Fitzgerald, followed by those of Whinfield, Nicolas, and Garner, and now by Mr. McCarthy. And notwithstanding the preference hinted by Mr. Fitzgerald, and avowed by Mr. McCarthy, for Omar to Saadi and Hafiz, we must declare our own opinion that the Quatrains of Omar can no more claim precedence over the Diwan of Hafiz, than can the Epigrams of Martial or of the Greek Anthology over the Odes of Horace and Anacreon. We share their high appreciation of the vigorous thought and picturesque imagery in which Omar so often em- bodies the scepticism with which he mocks the Sphinx whose riddle he despairs of solving ; but not only do we prefer the only half-intelligible mysticism which with Hafiz takes the place of such scepticism, but we must think that in all that constitutes poetry, Hafiz is far superior. And still less can we agree with our critics that Omar's Quatrains can be even compared for imagination, any more than for moral philosophy, with the Bustan and Gulistan of Saadi. Nothing, indeed, can surpass the epigrammatic terseness and vigour and imagery of some of those quatrains, as represented by Mr. Fitz- gerald. But a larger—we suspect, though without counting, a far larger—number of the whole, have little of these qualities. This is true even of the limited number which Mr. Fitzgerald has given us ; and still more is it apparent in the complete col- lection of Mr. McCarthy. What, for instance, can be more vapid than this ?—" Whenever you can get two measures of wine, drink, wherever you may be ; for he who acts thus is free from thy scorn or my scorn." And we might quote almost any number of such specimens from Mr. McCarthy, and not a few, not much better, even in Mr. Fitzgerald's version. And if Omar's reputation as a master of epigram will not be heightened by the number of Mr. McCarthy's translations, neither will it be so by a comparison of his literal prose with the free verse of Fitzgerald. There is usually something both amiable and modest in the temper which leads a man to attempt the trans- lation of a favourite author. "What no one with us shares, seems scarce our own;" and when the charms of a book in another language than our own have become known to us either in the first burst of novelty, or as the mature fruit of long familiarity, we long to share this enjoyment with others by giving them a translation. And then it seems so much more modest and humble an undertaking to translate than to originate, that the young author thinks he may hope to succeed in the former attempt, like the modest young doctor who thought he could cure a baby. But, in truth, the art of translation is a very difficult one, even in its simplest forms ; while in the higher ones it often becomes even impossible. The words expressive in one language of the higher, and especially the poetical, forms of thought, feeling, and imagination, never have their exact counterparts in another language. There may be a groundwork of correspondence between two words, but each suggests and calls up a whole train of associations which are different in each language, and which make the effect quite different in each case, so that the translation, however literal, is no true representation of the original. And above all is this the case when we are dealing with poetry. There, the thought, or meaning, and the words that express it, are as in- dissoluble as soul and body,and it is impossible to transfer that soul into another body, however carefully and skilfully copied in new materials from the original. A perfect translation should not only represent all the thoughts and images of the original, but be itself another original,—an English, not a Persian poem, such as an English poet would have written if he could have been put into the circumstances and condition of the Persian. There are a few such translations. The greatest is our English Bible, in which the genius of Tyndall created a book which is as really English as Hebrew or Greek. The modern revisers of the old translation have corrected some errors of grammar or lexicography; but they have in other respects often made sad work in their attempts at what we call translation, killing the life in attempts to improve the form. The Hebrew poetry has the special capability for reproduction in English rhythmical prose that its own rhythm is that of sentences rather than of words. The English translation of the Corpus Poeticura Boreale is another instance of a translation which has not killed out the life of the original; and other instances might be given. But, for the most part, the prose representation of a poem is little better than the dried flower in the botanist's hortus siceis, compared with its counterpart in the field. Such dry and shrivelled specimens of the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam are all that Mr. McCarthy has given us. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm which he expresses, and no doubt feels, for his author, they are sadly wanting alike in the poetic and epigrammatic qualities, no less than in "the accomplishment of verse." The contrast with Fitzgerald's translations is very great. Fitzgerald saw —as all successful translators have seen—that a certain amplification and paraphrase are necessary in order to give side-meanings, and associations, and shades of thought which belong to the word in the original, but which are not carried with it by the mere verbal representation of the correspond- ing word in the other language. He puts himself into the place of his author, drinks of his•spirit till he can say,- " I see no longer, I myself am there," and then pours forth in English verse what Omar would have said had he been an Englishman, or Fitzgerald had he been a. Persian. No one, we believe, will agree more readily than Mr. McCarthy himself, in this estimate of Fitzgerald's merits as a translator : we only regret that he should have persuaded himself that his own bald prose can help us to a better knowledge of Omar. He has only added another to those well- meant but vain attempts to give English readers a notion of what Persian poets have written. Saadi and Hafiz have been more than once translated into English, prose and verse, by enthusiastic admirers, but only to show the impossibility of success, except of a very humble kind.
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