Stanza 15 of the first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám has for its theme a denial of the afterlife and resurrection.
XV.
And those who husbanded the Golden Grain,
And those who flung it to the Winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn’d
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.
This stanza is based on no. 68 in the Bodleian manuscript:
زآن پیش که بر سرت شبیخون آرند
فرمای که تا بادهٔ گلگون آرند
تو زر نهای ای غافل نادان که تو را
در خاک نهند و باز بیرون آرند
The original is not set on a grain farm, but begins with a warning that a person could die in bed any night. FitzGerald’s “no such aureate Earth are turn’d” is so Latin that it is now probably difficult for most people to understand. He is saying that the earth in question, a cemetery for the farmers, does not have gold nuggets in it in the form of their corpses. The poet is warning that there is no resurrection, whatever the scriptures might say.
I translated it as free verse poetry in my Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: a New Translation from the Persian, no. 67.
The poem warns that before fate can ambush you one night, you should order up a glass of rose-red wine. I translated the last two lines this way:
- “For you’re not gold, you old fool — that they’ll bury you
in the ground, then dig you up again.”
This blunt and direct manner of address is faithful to the original, which calls the hearer ghāfel-e nādān “O heedless ignorant one.”
Transliteration:
z-ān pīsh keh bar sar-at shabīkhūn ārand,
farmāy keh tā bādeh’-e golgūn ārand.
to zar na-ī, ey ghāfel-e nādān, keh torā
dar khāk neḥand o bāz bīrūn ārand.
khāk, the Persian for earth or soil, is the origin of our English khaki as the color of a military uniform, which is tan or earth-colored. The British introduced the khaki uniform in India in the 1840s. Persian was used as the language of government in pre-British India, and many Persian words came into Hindustani (which we now call Hindi-Urdu).
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Resurrection and the afterlife are doctrines both of Christianity and Islam, and were adopted in rabbinical Judaism, as well. Mainstream Muslim theologians insisted on them, and denying these tenets was probably dangerous in the medieval period.
The unconventional quatrains collected under the rubric of “Omar Khayyam,” a Seljuk-era astronomer who died around 1131 AD, often deny these doctrines, however. (I don’t think the poetry is actually by Khayyam; it is later and by many poets.) I believe this literature is folk poetry, and represents a stream of Muslim secularism that flourished especially after the Mongol invasions of the 1220s and after. The Mongols were Buddhists and shamanists, and as rulers did not care to enforce Muslim orthodoxy. So for some 80 years, until the Mongol rulers of Iran began embracing Islam, you could get away with saying unorthodox things, and drinking wine. There is a lot of historical evidence for both.
Even once the Mongols became Muslims, they wore their religion lightly, and they were succeeded by Central Asian Turkic rulers, many of them nomads who practiced a folk religion. Some of their rulers were accused, at least, of being atheists, as with the rebel Qara Qoyunlu (Black Sheep) prince, Pir Budak, who took Shiraz briefly in the late 1450s and early 1460s. It was at his court that the calligrapher Mahmud Yerbudaki first assembled a whole book of unconventional quatrains under the title The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, attributing them to the astronomer ex post facto. They had been circulating for some time, listed in manuscripts as anonymous or attributed to other poets. Yerbudaki’s manuscript, which ended up in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, was one of the two on which FitzGerald depended.
Philosophers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037 AD) did not accept orthodox theological doctrines about the resurrection of the physical body, so the theme of this poem may have derived from philosophical circles. On the other hand, its simplicity and frankness make me think that it was the work of a simpler sort of person. I suspect a lot of carpenters, tilers and other craftsmen doubted that people were ever going to get up out of their graves, but went along with the preachers for fear of trouble. When they gathered among themselves away from prying eyes, they might read out poetry like this.
From Gilbert James, Fourteen Drawings Illustrating Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (London: Leonard Smithers & Co., 1898). Note the influence of Qajar-era modern Persian art.
The poetry ascribed to Khayyam often points out that no one has ever come back from the supposed other world, implying it is because there is no such thing and the dead have disintegrated in the ground.
Here is an example:
افسوس که سرمایه ز کف بیرون شد
وز دستِ اَجَل بسی جگرها خون شد
کس نآمد از آن جهان که پرسم از وی
کاحوالِ مسافران دنیا چون شد؟
I’d translate it in blank verse this way:
How sad that our cash slipped out of our hands,
and that fate’s grip wrung the blood from our hearts;
None came back from that world whom I could ask
what happened to all this world’s travelers.
“Cash” here is literally “capital,” but you get the point. Our short lives ending in death are being compared to bankruptcy and loss of capital. “Heart” in the original is “liver,” and in Persian poetry the liver often functions as “heart” does in English verse. I’m sure it has to do with medieval ideas about humors and the organs of the body. The last two lines imply that the people of the world are traveling toward certain death and extinction, and that is all there is, otherwise we’d have heard back from them.
It is bleak, but sometimes just stating a bleak reality is itself a form of transcendence.
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For more commentaries on FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubáiyát, see
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Commentary by Juan Cole with Original Persian
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