Omar Khayyam

Moment de rendez-vous. Miniature à l'observatoire Ulug Beg à Samarcande, XVe siècle.

It seems to me inconceivable to leave Samarcande without evoking the author of the Robaiyat. In the book Samarcande, published in 1988, Amin Maalouf brings to life Omar Khayyam in this city then jewel of the Arab world. In the East in the 11th century, the poet is sometimes applauded for his eloquent knowledge, sometimes threatened for his godless poetry. In Samarcande, he would have written his quatrains in a secret book to avoid offending the religious susceptibilities. Born in the northeast of Iran, Khayyam, whose patronymic means manufacturer of tents, travelled really to Bukhara where it met Avicenne who became his master and to Samarcande in 1070 where he wrote the Demonstrations of Problems of Algebra which deal with cubic equations. Is it necessary to believe the historian Rashid-ed-Din from Hamadân, author at the beginning of the 14th century of a world history which will appear among the masterpieces of the world historic literature, when he tells that Omar Khayyam, then studying to Nichapour, accepts a pact proposed by one of his two friends ? The first one of the three who will make fortune will support the others two. When one of the three friends becomes the Prime Minister, Omar asks for protection to conduct his research free from want. Hassan, the third friend, asks to be introduced in the court. The wishes are fulfillled but Hassan plots to take the place of his protector. Discovered, he is expelled. That is when the one called "The Old man of the Mountain" found the Ismaili order of Haschischins, eaters of hashish, by which they are looking for the ecstasy. But it is with adopting the sacred duty to put to death the "Enemies of the Truth" they become known. "Haschischin" will become "assassin" (murderer) in the writings of the french chroniclers of the crusades that the only evocation of this name made tremble with terror. Doctor Moreau had a good sense of humour when he created, in 1844, quay d’Anjou on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris, the Club of Haschischins dedicated to the experiment of drugs, place frequented by Charles Baudelaire during the writing of Fleurs du Mal.

Omar Khayyam cultivated all the important sciences of his time : mathematics, physics, astronomy, philosophy and medicine, domains in which he reached the highest degree of erudition. He introduced the leap year into the former Persian calendar. He is considered as one of the biggest mathematicians of the Middle Ages but he is as author of epigrammatic poems called Robâiyât that he is known. "Probably a Persian word, the ruba-'i consists of four verses, built on a unique rhythm ; the first, the second and the fourth are rhyming, the third being a neutral verse. Because of the brevity of the quatrain, the poet has to present his thought without any embellishment ?" (Mohammad Hassan Rezvanian, Encyclopædia Universalis).

"The existence of this man, writes Khosrow Varasteh in a publication of the Tehran Fine Arts school General Administration in 1957, was torn between the thirst to know everything and the fervent desire to benefit fully this fleeting moment which is life, to distil the essence from it, its sole reality, its precarious joys, love, wine, music, the roses, the moon on a terrace, a field in bloom, the perfumed morning wind… He was honored and respected as scholar but hated and banished as philosopher and poet, especially by the theologians." We said of him that he was sufi, esoteric, that he said he was unfaithful but religious. I prefer to join those who see in him a sceptical and tolerant hedonist. And a regular user of the tapshan, which Khosrow Varasteh calls "terrace" for lack of a better word. That is why Omar Khayyam has his place on the tapchane of honor. Yet, guess what, I suggest that the dimensions of this furniture, which give it its harmony, its comfort and its capacity in the well-being and which make it insert itself ideally in the house, leading for his users in an elevated feeling, result from the calculations of the mathematician poet. Now, who can tell me what is its golden ratio ?

In spring I sometimes sit down at the edge of a meadow in full bloom.
When a young woman then brings me a cup of wine I certainly am not occupied with my salvation.
If I would, at such a moment of perfection, I would not be worth a dime.
Robaiyat 25 translated by Hans van Rossum based on the French translation by Franz Toussaint.

Saad, the apple grower, argued that if Omar Khayyam spoke often of the wine, he did not drink it. He tells about the desire of the wine, the desire of the women, he said. The intensity is in the desire and not in the consumption. According to him, the wine of Khayyam is of a spiritual nature, a kind of mystic potion, and the words of love are for God himself. That is also what defends his last translator Omar Ali-Shah, very critical of the previous translations, in particular that of Edward FitzGerald. The English poet, who otherwise did not like the East, was at the origin of Quatrains introduction in West, the only work he finished and published in his lifetime. He recognized to have softened the impact of Khayyam nihilism and his concerns about the death and he sometimes combined different quatrains to enable a rhyme. FitzGerald himself referred to his work as "transmogrification". To translate poetry is a very difficult exercise. To translate Quatrains is at the top of this art. Because, in contrast with the descriptive and impressionistic haiku, the brief form of Omar Khayyam's quatrains "pries its way upwards the formulation of the metaphysical problematic" (Esfandiar Esfandi, in The magazine of Tehran). The Orientalist Franz Toussaint preferred to translate them from the Persian original text rather than from English, with the decision not to try to translate quatrains into quatrains, but in a poetic prose which he considered more faithful. Marguerite Yourcenar consoles thus the translators : "Whatever one does, we always reconstruct the monument in his own way. But it is much more to use only authentic stones." 

Statue représentant Omar Khayyām à Nishapur (Iran). Photo Muhammad Mahdi Karim.

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