The sixth quatrain of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám continues with its celebration of wine-drinking in the morning. It connects ancient Iran’s language of Middle Persian or Pahlavi, spoken in the Sasanian Empire 224–651 AD with the biblical figure of David, said in the Qur’an to be the author of the Psalms.
VI.
And David’s Lips are lock’t; but in divine
High piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!”
“Red Wine!” – the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That yellow Cheek of her’s’ to incarnadine.
FitzGerald may have been thinking of Psalm 104:15 here,
- and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
(New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)
Of course, David did not write the Psalms, and they are in Hebrew, not Middle Persian — though the Jews of Babylon interacted quite a lot with Middle Persian.
FitzGerald here subverted the Christian appropriation of David as a forefather of Jesus, and made him instead a forerunner of Omar Khayyam, possibly because of Psalms like the above. FitzGerald departed the Anglican church, I think around 1850, though he had long viewed himself as an “infidel” (and despaired of marrying the convinced Christian Elizabeth Charlesworth because of it). He was what we would now call gay or perhaps bisexual (Victorians did not have those categories), and joined a legion of secular atheist writers of the mid-Victorian period — Richard Monckton Milnes (his friend), Algernon Swinburne, George Meredith, Matthew Arnold and many others. The skepticism about conventional religion characteristic of the Persian poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam was one of its attractions for him.
“Red Wine!” – the Nightingale cries to the Rose
FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:6
A.J. Arberry proposed that in line 1, mentioning David, FitzGerald was drawing on a verse in the Calcutta manuscript of the Rubáiyát (C 92), which is reproduced at this site:
با باده نشین، که مُلْکِ محمود این است
وَزْ چنگ شنو، که لحنِ داوود این است؛
از آمده و رفته دگر یاد مکن
حالی خوش باش، زانکه مقصود این است
My (Juan’s) translation of this one is:
Sit with the wine, for this is Mahmud’s shore;
the harp is playing David’s melodies.
Recall this hectic to and fro no more–
be happy now: our purpose lies in this.
The transliteration is:
Bā bāde neshīn, ke molk-e Maḥmūd īn ast
va z chang shenow, ke laḥn-e Dāwūd īn ast;
az āmade o rafte digar yād makon
ḥālī khosh bāsh, z ān-ke maqsūd īn ast
—-
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——-
Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998 – 1030) ruled much of Central Asia, Afghanistan and north India. His court poet Manuchehri “praised wine as a source of resilience and celebration, especially during cultural festivals like Nowruz.”
The reference to David and the harp recalls the Muslim belief (shared by premodern Jews and Christians) that David authored and sang the Psalms.
The other three lines of 1:6 are drawn from the Bodleian manuscript number 67 (66 in my modern translation):
روزیست خوش و هوا نه گرماست و نه سرد
ابر از رخ گلزار همی شوید گرد
بلبل با زبان پهلوی با گل زرد
فریاد همی زند که می باید خورد
I translated it my own book in blank verse. A literal rendering would be
It’s a beautiful day, neither torrid nor freezing;
Rain clouds wash the face of the flower garden.
The nightingale speaks in the Pahlavi tongue to the yellow flower
crying out that it must drink wine.
The joke here is that a person with a sallow or yellowish complexion was thought in medieval Iran to be in need of some wine to give a healthier pink complexion to the cheeks. So a yellow tulip is being advised by the nightingale to imbibe for the sake of its health. One of the ways more secular-minded Muslims got around the (much-disregarded) prohibition on wine in strict Muslim law was to make an argument that Islam allowed medicine, and when wine was drunk for medicinal purposes it was all right. A sallow cheek could then be a pretext for some tippling.
One of my complaints about FitzGerald’s otherwise quite wonderful loose rendering is that he liked Latin words (Cambridge-educated gentlemen like FitzGerald could actually write poetry in Latin), and he used “incarnadine” to mean “redden.” The original Persian tends to avoid high falutin’ words and is usually direct and simple, an approach to which I tried to hew in my own, modern, poetic translation.
Earlier in this series:
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:1
“Awake my little ones and fill the Cup!” FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:2
“Those who Stood before the Tavern” – FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:3
Now the New Year is Reviving old Desires: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:4
“But still the Vine her ancient Ruby Yields:” Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:5
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