Analysis Of Khayyam's Rubaiyat

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1. Introduction:
Although it has been more than one hundred and sixty years from the first translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat by Edward Fitzgerald, this eloquent literary text has remained as the best in comparison to other translations. Along with all the prominent features of Fitzgerald’s translation, if we consider the text from the viewpoint of modern literary translation such as “loyalty to the text” and by considering the precepts of discourse analysis, so many questions are raised.
There have been so many researches around the structure and the meaning of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and Fitzgerald’s translation. After Edward Fitzgerald’s (1809-1883) brilliant recreation of Rubaiyat in nineteenth century and actually when Khayyam was introduced …show more content…

The task of the translator is to compose an analogous text in another language, and the translator is therefore not firstly a writer and then a reader, but firstly a reader who becomes a writer. As Paz states, “the original poem comes to exist inside another poem: less a copy than transmutation”(bassnett & Lefevere, 1998, p. 66)
According to Heylen (1993),very text convey a particular ideology and view point of the original writer through which the author expresses his or her opinion of the world” (5).
Poetry translation is a challenging task due to the significance of form, content, poetic and musical devices in order to convey the voice of poetry.
Since the form of poetry cannot be fully imitated and followed in the process of translation, some changes may occur in the voice of the original poem during the process of transferring the profusion of emotions and the meaning, demonstrated by the original poet.
In such a process, the poem goes under some either obligatory or optional changes, or as it is followed in this research, under some ideological changes in the “voice” underlying poetry. In the present study, these ideological voices are highlighted in the original text as well in the translated text of Rubaiyat and then they were compared in order to trace the extent of Fitzgerald’s loyalty in maintaining the main voice of …show more content…

In this study, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Khorramshahi (1994), rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald (the First and Fifth edition) with original Persian text edited by Foroughi has been chosen. Khorramshahi (1994) includes a collection of 178 Persian quatrains that Foroughi and Ghani have selected among a myriad of quatrains attributed to Khayyam, along with 75 English translated quatrains in the first edition and 101 in the fifth edition. For the purposes of the present study, the English verses of the first edition would be analyzed and compared with the corresponding Persian Rubaiyat. A literal translation of each quatrain by Arberry and Saidi has been used in the research in order to help to clarify the manifestation of differences between the (ST) and the (TT).
2.2 Research questions:
Regarding what Fitzgerald as the translator of Rubaiyat says, “better a live sparrow than a stuffed Eagle” (Yohannan, 1977, p. 103)one finds it vital to investigate what Fitzgerald actually did as a translator and whether we can call him a translator who intended to make Khayyam known to the world or a poet who exploited our poet’s artistic skills as a launch pad to his own success and popularity.
This study attempted to answer the following

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