Translator of the Rubaiyat

THE LIFE OF EDWARD FITZGERALD --Alfred McKinley Terhune--Yale ($5).

In London one day in 1861 Poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his great friend, Poet Algernon Swinburne, rummaging through the penny book box at Bookseller Quaritch's, made a sensational "find" -- the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rendered into English by an anonymous translator. "Next day," Swinburne reported crossly, "when we returned for more [copies], the price was raised to the iniquitous and exorbitant sum of twopence. You should have heard . . . the . . . impressive severity of Gabriel's humorous expostulations with [Mr. Quaritch], on behalf of a defrauded if limited public."

The Rubaiyat caught on quickly. But its translator still remained unknown. Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced this Rubaiyat to the U.S., showed it to crusty Historian Thomas Carlyle, remarking that it was rumored to be the work of a "Rev. Edward FitzGerald, who lived somewhere in Norfolk and spent much time in his boat." Cried Carlyle: "Why, he's no more Reverend than I am! He's a very old friend of mine . . . and [he] might have spent his time to much better purpose than in busying himself with the verses of that old Mohammedan blackguard."

No Lion. This biography by Syracuse University Professor Terhune is the best documented life to date of Victorian England's least-documented poet. "Fitz," a lifelong friend of Carlyle, Thackeray and Tennyson, came of a rich and ancient family, was able to shape his life about as he wished it. He did not wish to become a literary lion. "Tell Thackeray," he wrote firmly to a friend at the age of 21, "that he is never to invite me to his house, as I never intend to go. ... I am going to become a great bear; and have got all sorts of Utopian ideas. . . . These may all be very absurd, but I try the experiment on myself, so I can do no great hurt."

His Utopian experiment consisted chiefly in following the Wordsworthian principles of "plain living and high thinking." Shunning his parents' wealthy house, FitzGerald rented a small cottage in Suffolk, where he lived for 16 years with a dog, a cat and a parrot. His staple diet was bread, fruit, cheese and fish, his recreations walking and sailing, his routine "of an even, grey-paper character." "He [lives]," complained one of his friends, "in a state of disgraceful indifference to everything, except grass and fresh air. . . . Half the self-sacrifice . . . the moral resolution, which he exercises . . . would amply furnish forth a martyr or a missionary. His tranquillity is like a pirated copy of the peace of God."

When his admirers called him "Philosopher" ("Diogenes without his dirt," said one), FitzGerald retorted that he had merely "a talent for dullness." He rose early, spent his mornings reading "old books" and doing occasional writing; in the afternoon he casually drew and painted. Evenings, he smoked, played the spinet, and entertained a few local callers. "Day follows day with unvaried movement," he declared; "there is the same level meadow with geese upon it always lying before my eyes: the same pollard oaks: with now and then the butcher or the washerwoman trundling by. . . ."

Poetic Bowels. To his friends, "Old Fitz" was both a ruthlessly honest critic and a warmhearted patron. Tennyson, who was a proud man, as well as crotchety and hypochondriacal, readily accepted from FitzGerald unwavering criticism and hundreds of pounds. "This really great man," said FitzGerald, "thinks more about his bowels and nerves than about the Laureate wreath he was born to inherit." He was almost as observing about himself: "I know that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease; but ... I have not the strong inward call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of anything bigger than a mouse."

In 1853, when FitzGerald was 44, he published, at his own expense, his translation of six works by Spanish Playwright Calderon (which the Athenaeum considered "quite unnecessary to treat as a serious work"). Then a friend introduced him to what FitzGerald dubbed "the Sweetmeat, Childish, Oriental World" of the Persian language. Three years later, he braved the critics with a rendition of the Persian poem, Salaman and Absal.

By then, too, FitzGerald had begun to wonder if his lonely, esthetical life were not a huge mistake--"[a] seedy dullness ... a ... total failure and mess." He proceeded to complete the mess by marrying a gaunt Sunday-school teacher. "Lucy Barton," says tactful Biographer Terhune, "was doubtless attractive; but she lacked physical charm." "I am going to be married --don't congratulate me," the bridegroom told a friend. He turned up at church in "an old slouch hat," spoke only once at the wedding breakfast. Offered some blanc mange, he waved it away, muttering "Ugh! Congealed bridesmaid."

Chamber of Horrors. Lucy FitzGerald chose to live in London, in a house whose front windows looked out on a zoo, the back windows on a cemetery. The dim living room was papered in dark green--a "chamber of horrors," groaned Poet FitzGerald, "[in which my wife looks] like Lucretia Borgia." FitzGerald found "a sort of consolation" in "some curious Infidel and Epicurean Tetrastichs by a Persian of the Eleventh Century--as Savage against Destiny ... as Manfred--but mostly of Epicurean Pathos of this kind --'Drink--for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden and find us not.'" After a few moons, his marriage collapsed. Two years later the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* appeared and presently became (with the exception of the King James version of the Bible) the most popular translation in English.

FitzGerald returned to his Suffolk solitude, where he wrote his little-known translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles. As he aged, he became one of the county sights--a "tall, sad-faced elderly gentleman ... in an ill-fitting suit. . . blue spectacles on nose and an old cape. . . ." He lived to see his Rubaiyat become famous, but died (1883) a couple of decades before its fame became "a mania which swept the world" and posed a literary question that still engrosses Rubaiyat lovers : How much of Omar is Omar and how much is FitzGerald?

*Twelfth Century Persian mathematician, court astronomer for Sultan Malik-Shah, epigrammatist and classmate of Hassan ben Sabbah ("The Old Man of the Mountain"), who founded the fanatical hashish-smoking Persian Assassins.

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