Accident, Orientalism, And Edward Fitzgerald As Translator (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the mid 1850s, Edward FitzGerald wrote to Edward Byles Cowell, the friend who tutored him in Persian, about the two men's efforts to translate Persian poetry. FitzGerald had decided that Persian poetry in English should seem Persian still. "I am more & more convinced of the Necessity of keeping as much as possible to the Oriental Forms, & carefully avoiding any that bring one back to Europe and the 19th Century," he announces to Cowell, a scholar of Eastern languages who patiently redacted FitzGerald's translations, including many stanzas of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. "It is better to be orientally obscure than Europeanly clear." (1) The remark suggests FitzGerald's investment in a stereotypical dichotomy: transparent and intelligible Europe versus the mysterious East. This thinking, unoriginal and not particularly attractive, reflects prejudices associated with Orientalism, and indeed scholars often assume FitzGerald's most esteemed translation from the Persian, his Rubaiyat, to be an Orientalist text. (2) Edward Said identifies the poem as part of a secondary tier of Orientalist writing, a genre created by "Oriental enthusiasts." Such work involves "a kind of free-floating mythology of the Orient" that has foundations in "the conceit of nations and of scholars." (3) Understood in these terms, the Rubaiyat reflects the hubris of imperial Britain, reinforcing imperialist prejudices and bolstering imperialist aims. Iran B. Hassani Jewett advances a similar view in her study of FitzGerald, positing that FitzGerald's British arrogance, his "belief of his inherent English superiority," allowed him to think that his very limited knowledge of Persian would suffice for his translation project. That misguided hubris, she contends, "enabled FitzGerald to compose his masterpiece in his own way, unhampered by any bothersome doubts." (4) Barbara Black extends Said's argument in her discussion of the Rubaiyat as a fetishizing collection, explicitly connecting FitzGerald's Orientalism to his translation practice. "A member of what translation theorists label the hegemonic language and culture, FitzGerald assumes a paternalistic pose as the civilizer or improver of the dominated language and culture, Khayyam's Persian," Black writes. (5) In this interpretation, translation becomes FitzGerald's means towards an Orientalist end. Such approaches to the Rubaiyat have valid elements, as remarks from FitzGerald's own pen attest. But I suggest that they fail fully to capture the character of the poem, because they misconstrue FitzGerald's translation ethos and its role in shaping the Rubaiyat. This ethos, deeply individual and individualistic, influences the thematics of the Rubaiyat and the attitude of the poem's lyric speaker. FitzGerald was attracted by the idea of genuine imitation being achieved by an accidental imitator, a writer who has not set imitation as a primary goal. Recognizing his own limits as a translator, and convinced of the severe limitations of translation as an enterprise, he nurtured a vision of good translation as imperfect re-creation that was governed largely by fortune. (6) He sought to achieve such re-creation in the Rubaiyat, and the liberties he took in translation served this ideal.