Omar Khayyam - a life Read online

  So we have certain indications of a man going his own way in solitude, appealed to by others but independent of their thought. Next, by his remarks scattered through the Algebra, we discover that he had mastered such advanced processes as equations of the third degree solved by geometrical means,, and the use of hyperbolas, which he did not learn from the Greeks, and which were not relearned in Europe until Descartes. He also had studied still more difficult problems—"some of them impossible," he says.

  In the introduction to his Algebra he writes:

  "However, I have not been able to concentrate my thoughts on it, hindered as I have been by troublesome obstacles. We have been suffering from a dearth of men of science, possessing only a group as few in number as its hardships have been many. Most of our contemporaries are pseudo scientists, who mingle truth with falsehood, who are not above deceit, and who use the little that they know of the sciences for base material purposes only. When they see a distinguished man intent on seeking the truth, one who prefers honesty and does his best to reject the falsehood and lies—avoiding hypocrisy and treachery—they despise him and make fun of him."*

  Shahrazuri, who wrote the "Recreation of Souls" about a century after Omar's lifetime, supplies us with an interesting afterword upon his character:

  "His eminence in astronomy and philosophy would have become a proverb, if he had only been able to control himself."

  There is no doubt that we are dealing with a penetrating mind of extraordinary ability. That he suspected that the earth revolved upon its axis is simply an assumption. Some of the Moslem scientists of his century did believe it. But in expressing such an opinion they would be faced with the antagonism of orthodox Islam.

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  * From The Algebra of Omar Khayyam, by Daoud S. Kasir Ph. D. A recent and very able translation undertaken at the suggestion of Professor David Eugene Smith, and published by Teachers College, Columbia University.

  The Wheel of Heaven quatrain.

  At least once Omar suggests in a quatrain that he conceived of the earth as turning upon its axis. The rubai beginning In chark-i-falak, I have taken as follows:

  This Wheel of Heaven by which we are amazed

  A Chinese lantern like to it we know—

  The Sun the candle, the universe the shade,

  And we like its unheeding shadow forms.

  The Persian here is difficult to translate. The first two lines end in verbs of exactly opposite meaning—the first, that we do not comprehend at all, the second that we know, familiarly. Omar apparently meant that we are confounded by the Wheel of Heaven—which is probably the starry band of the zodiac—while a Chinese, or ordinary, lantern we understand readily enough.

  The third line is clear. All the translators agree that the sun is the light, or the candle or lamp, while the earth or world is the shade. But I wonder if the Persian 'alam does not mean the universe here, instead of the earth? It is an old word, signifying the world, the whole world. If Omar had meant, as I believe he did, the universe, he could have used no other word.

  And certainly no astronomer would ever have conceived of the sun as a candle within our earth. In fact no man of ordinary intelligence would have written that. On the other hand the concept of the sun as the candle of the great universe is crystal-clear.

  The last line is interesting, and has been given various meanings by the translators. Nicolas says that, like figures on a lantern shade we remain in stupefaction, while Whinfield slurs it with his "trembling forms" and Garner and Thompson both give the final verb a more active meaning with their "While mortals are but Phantom Figures traced—Upon the Shade, forever onward hurled," and "We are like figures that in it turn about." M. K. is even more emphatic "And We the figures whirling dazed around it."

  Except for Nicolas and Whinfield, I do not know if these translators had command of Persian. It is evident that the quatrain stumps everyone including FitzGerald. But if we grant that Omar conceived of the earth as revolving through space, lighted by the sun, while we cling to its surface in ignorance, the thing is clear beyond doubt. Remember that he uses the Chinese lantern* for comparison. And Chinese lanterns are not magic lanterns, nor do they revolve. They do have inanimate figures painted on their shades.

  FitzGerald, as usual, suggests Omar's thought beautifully by sheer fantasy without literal translation.

  "We are no other than a moving row

  Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go

  Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held

  In Midnight by the Master of the Show."

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  * Curiously enough the word for lantern, fanous, appears to be Greek instead of Persian.

  Omar and the orthodox of Islam.

  That Omar did come into conflict with orthodox religious opinion is beyond doubt. For one thing he was accused of fellowship with the infidel Assassins. Traces of that conflict are noticeable in Persia today. Often during my stay in that country I asked, why Omar was so little recognized by them today, and they answered in effect: "We Persians have our religion. We esteem the writings of Jallal ud Din Rumi for example because he is animated by a devout spirit. He makes clear our own thoughts to us. But Omar Khayyam was—how do you say it—irreligious."

  There is no evidence that Omar had any intercourse with Hassan or the Assassin propagandists. But the legend of the Three Schoolfellows—which makes out, long after they were all dead, that Nizam al Mulk, Omar and Hassan went to school together and formed a compact that they would aid each other thereafter—pictures him as intimate with Hassan. Omar and Hassan were two of the leading spirits of Persia in their generation; they appeared on the scene at the same time, and they died within a year of each other; Hassan is almost ubiquitous in his traveling about, and it was his custom to invite distinguished men to Alamut. So there is a strong probability that Omar may have been one of the guests of Alamut.

  Moslems of that time traveled more than they do now. The current of intellectual life ran strong, after that great eleventh century in Baghdad. Every one who could, performed a pilgrimage; the travels of Ibn Jubair, al Biruni, Nasir-i-Khusrau and many others of that time have become famous; Malikshah was in the saddle the greater part of his reign. Mighty caravans from China, India, Constantinople, passed through Khorasan. All Islam was, so to speak, on the go.

  Omar Khayyam made a pilgrimage, whether to Mecca or Jerusalem, we do not know. His quatrains give the impression that he did not dwell, most of his life, like Hafiz, in one place; without doubt he accompanied Malikshah upon occasion, and Malikshah was in Syria in 1075 when his Seljuk Turks conquered Jerusalem.

  When I was in Persia I found very few people acquainted with the grave of Omar, although they had plenty to say about the tombs of Hafiz, outside Shiraz, and that of Avicenna in Hamadan. One man did say that he had known Meshed-bound pilgrims to go out of their way at Nisapur to find the grave of Omar Khayyam—and spit upon it.

  In Persia today the verses of Hafiz, Ja'mi, the epic of Firdawsi, and the extraordinary work of Rumi, the Mathnawi, are favored far beyond the quatrains of Omar which are little known and less regarded. In fact, although I had no difficulty in finding good manuscript copies of Hafiz, Ja'mi and Rumi, I did not see anywhere a single copy of Omar's verses.

  It is known that Omar's calendar was discarded after Malikshah's death, and that Omar remained in partial exile—whether voluntary or involuntary—from the court and the academies in his last years.*

  Knowing all this, the impress of his character becomes clearer to us. We have still one more measure by which to measure him, the rubaiyat itself.

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  * In two details this book departs from the conjectures of scholars.

  First, Omar's birth. It is placed about ten years later than the usually accepted date (about 1052 instead of c. 1043-44). Omar's life coincided almost exactly with that of Hassan ibn Sabah, and ev
en at the later date of birth, the two would have been over seventy years at their deaths. A study of the dates of men who knew Omar in the life seems to indicate that he was younger than has been generally believed, at the time when he undertook his astronomical work at the observatory.

  Second, that Omar was part Arab. This is indicated by his name, by his father's name, by the nature of his early studies and by certain characteristics such as his brevity and bluntness of speech, his patience in carrying work to its end, and the almost savage clarity of his quatrains—traits not usually found in the Persian. It is possible that his father was an Arab.

  The Quatrains.

  I have read in the original Persian most of the verse believed to be Omar's. My translation of that verse is scattered in Omar's dialogue throughout this book. Only eight quatrains are translated complete in an attempt to show Omar's verse in its varying moods.

  But in studying the quatrains a clearer impression of his personality is obtained. Not by comparison with modern ideas, but by comparison with the writings, and the known characters, and the thought, of men of his time.* By taking, as it were, the shadow shape of the Omar revealed in the quatrains, and placing it upon the clear pattern of the aspirations, the follies, the dogma, the superstition and the longing of his time the impression is clear.

  It is that of a man who, like Avicenna, revolted against the fixed ideas of his age. While Avicenna's revolt was intellectual, Omar's was passionate in its intensity.

  Oriental scholars and the Persians themselves assure us— in spite of the many cults, and schools of thought that claim Omar for their own nowadays—that Omar's poetry is the expression of his own life. It is the fruit of his experience, written down from time to time. It was not, therefore, as our saying goes, written for publication.

  Reading the Persian, one cannot escape the conviction that this is pure realism. When Omar speaks of wine, he means wine; he is not using the hidden allegories of the Sufis and mystics of his time. When he speaks of a girl, it is a girl of flesh and blood.

  At the same time a powerful imagination is at work upon the objects of reality. When Omar considers a cup, he reflects that a maker of such a cup would not dash it into pieces upon the ground—yet the loveliest human bodies are mangled, or decay in sickness, by inevitable fate. He pours wine from a jar, and wonders whether this clay were not once a sighing lover like himself, its lips to the lips of the beloved, its arms about her throat. A drunken fancy? Very likely. But there it is.

  It is not the almost brutal realism of Nasir-i-Khusrau, who could exclaim beside a dunghill, "Behold the luxury of the world, and here am I the fool who craved it"—or wonder—"O why didst Thou make the lips and teeth of Tartar beauties so fair to see?"

  Nor is it quite the melancholy typical of so many Persians, who were often wittier and more fluent than Omar Khayyam. True, the concept of the foxes breeding and the lions making their dens in the palace where once Jamshid lifted high his cup is usual enough. But the following image of Bahram, who set so many snares for hunted beasts, caught at last by the snare of death is not so typical.

  Many Persians of that time might have written, "See how the nightingale clings to the rose!" Yet in Omar's mind the wind strips the beauty from the rose and scatters its petals upon the ground—and a human body might well rest beneath such a rosebush that grows out of the earth and sinks into it again. Did he remember that, when he told Nizam of Samarkand that his grave would be where blossoms fell twice in the year?

  Omar's verse escapes the patterns of his time. It suffers a sea change into something not easily explained. There is, for one thing, the fire motif which creeps in so frequently—"Khayyam hath fallen into griefs furnace"—and—

  "O, burning, burning, burnt, O, thou to be

  Consumed in fires of Hell made bright by thee!"**

  Omar grieves for youth forsaking him; he cries to the cupbearer to hasten to bring wine because the night speeds by with its revelry; he mourns the friends who have left him solitary at the banquet of life. He echoes the refrain of Villon, "Or beuvez fort, tant que ru peut courir." Yet Villon could write his own epitaph, as a hanged man swinging at the wind's touch, with a plea for deliverance to "Prince Jhesus, qui sur tous a maistrie" while Omar can only question, question, question God.

  His cry of agony is heard in almost every quatrain. The moon he loved will rise and set when he is no longer there to see; the flowers blooming at the edge of a stream—he must not step upon them because a lovely head may be buried there; the body of the loved one, it is no more than the clay from which the flowers bloom; his companions have left him—they will never be back again.

  In spite of the versions of a few translators, Omar does not beseech forgiveness, nor does he voice any accusation. He wonders why wine should be a sin, but wine brings forgetfulness. At times he lashes out with mockery at the reassuring ones who offer nepenthes other than the wine which transmutes pain into nothingness. What else can relieve his agony?

  So incessant is this note of pain that one who follows it closely from quatrain to quatrain becomes obsessed by it. There is no relief. You want to ward it off, to give respite to the agony of the struggling spirit. There is no respite. You feel that the man is dying before your eyes, and that he knows it. "Do not blaspheme wine; it is bitter only because it is my life."

  Perhaps this simple human suffering is the thing we have not understood in Omar.

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  * Nizam al Mulk for instance wrote a dissertation on the conduct of Sultans, known as the Siasset nameh: Ghazali's writings, notably his Revival of Religious Knowledge, are numerous. Then there is the Lament of Baba Tahir, the Travels and the Divan of that extraordinary Nasir-i-Khusrau, and the effusions of blind Abu 'l Ala, the memoirs of Usama, the Chahar Maqala abovementioned, which is full of anecdotes, and many others, as I found to my cost.

  ** Thompson's translation.

  FitzGerald.

  More than seven centuries after his death, a moody kindred spirit in another land gathered together the remnants of Omar's verses, and from them created one of the masterpieces of our literature.

  The enormous popularity of Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam brought forth in turn volumes of discussion and comment upon the Persian astronomer and the English poet. The question as to how much of this Rubaiyat is Omar and how much FitzGerald has been debated for years.

  But one who reads the original Persian cannot escape the conviction that FitzGerald has created something new and whole out of the fragments of Omar's verse. In doing so FitzGerald took a little from Hafiz, a little from Avicenna. He did not translate Omar's quatrains but he paraphrased them beautifully.

  FitzGerald wrote nothing else that can be compared to this paraphrase of Omar, and the ablest scholars have not been able to make a translation equal to FitzGerald's inimitable rendering.

  Perhaps in brooding over Omar's quatrains, that taciturn Englishman had for a brief moment the gift of knitting cobwebs together, of weighing thistledown, and weaving a magic tapestry of dragon-flies' wings.

  Table of Contents

  Contents

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  Author's note

  Back Cover