“Came out by the Same Door:” FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:27

The 27th quatrain in the first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám casts doubt on the value of metaphysical speculation and scholastic learning.

XXVII.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
    About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.

Edward Heron-Allen and A. J. Arberry thought that it was in the main drawn from no. 121 in the Bodleian manuscript, a slightly different version of which is on the web here .

یک چند به کودکی به استاد شدیم
یک چند به استادی خود شاد شدیم
پایان سخن نگر که ما را چه رسید
چون آب در آمدیم و بر باد شدیم

This original does not question the value of the master’s teaching but shows regret and nostalgia for old school days when the author and his friends were young and honing their craft, now that life has passed all too quickly and death beckons. In my book on The Rubáiyát I translated the last two lines in blank verse:

“And now just look at what’s become of us:
We came like water and left like the wind.”

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“Teacher with his Pupil,” c. 1595–1600, India, Mughal Dynasty (1526-1756) The Cleveland Museum of Art .

Heron-Allen and Arberry suggested that the last line in FitzGerald’s 1:27 derived from no. 286 in the Calcutta manuscript that Edward Cowell sent back from India.

This quatrain, like many attributed to Khayyam, is said by some anthologists to be by a different author, in this case Najm al-Din Razi (d. 1256), who taught a spiritual path of mystical love but upheld the need to follow religious law. Like many Iranians in the 1200s, he had to flee the Mongol invasions and settled in Baghdad after failing to secure patronage in Seljuk Anatolia. Ironically, he was one of the authors who invented the tradition of attributing Persian quatrains to the eleventh-century astronomer, Omar Khayyam.

An affordable e-book of Razi’s The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return in Hamid Algar’s expert translation is available.

This poem in the Calcutta MS is also on the web, attributed to Razi, here.

بازی بودم پریده از عالم ناز
تابوک برم ز شیب صیدی به فراز
اینجا چو نیافتم کسی محرم راز
ز آن در که درآمدم بدر رفتم باز

Here is my translation of this one, as an alexandrine (iambic hexameter):

I was a falcon flying from this coy world;
In one fell swoop I took my prey into the heights.
Since I could find no confidante for secrets here,
I went out through the door by which I entered in.

Heron-Allen and Arberry thus thought that Calcutta no. 286 provided FitzGerald with his last line for 1:27. This poem has Sufi overtones, of disappointment in a world of superficial coquetry and flirtation where the author could find no friend or lover sufficiently close with whom to share his or her most intimate secrets, and who therefore fled the material world. It certainly does sound more like Razi than like the world-weary verse usually attributed to Khayyam.

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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