'Leaning Through Silence to a Dead Man’s Mind'

Sometimes a sliver of poetry or prose, a single line or phrase, attracts our attention by glowing, as though surrounded by darkness. Take these words from “Edward Fitzgerald” (The Covenant, 1984) by Dick Davis: “Leaning through silence to a dead man’s mind.” 

Fitzgerald (1809-83), of course, is the English poet best known for his translation from the Persian of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (1859). I remember in junior high school having a gift booklet of the poem and sitting in study hall memorizing stanza XI:

 

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

 A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

 And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

 

Or here, from Fitzgerald’s first edition, the version I learned:

 

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

 

That’s how I learned the meaning of the archaic “enow.” Davis is the leading contemporary translator from the Persian, and his poem is an act of communion with and gratitude for his poetic forebear. Beyond that immediate significance, the phrase noted above stands as a metaphor for any reader encountering a writer from the past. When we read a book, we erase its inertness and reanimate the text. We gain admission to his mind. Davis also wrote an essay about Fitzgerald and his translation:

 

“The first, anonymous, and very small (250 copies) edition of the Rubaiyat appeared in 1859; though unnoticed initially, within a few years it had achieved fame among Victorian writers and artists (Rossetti, Browning, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Meredith and Ruskin were early admirers [ . . .]. Subsequent editions appeared in 1868, 1872 and 1879, each involving changes, including the addition and dropping of stanzas and the rewriting of various phrases. A posthumous edition, prepared from FitzGerald's own marked up copy of the fourth edition, was published in 1889.”

 

Here is Davis’ complete poem:

 

“East Anglia, a century ago:

I see Fitgerald bow

To Attar’s Conference

As I do now

 

“Leaning through silence to a dead man’s mind,

A stranger’s pilgrimage

(As in the book we read)

To a blank page –

 

“An immanence, remote, but quickened by

An old, ill scholar’s breath:

I see you wrest this life

From brother death.”