'Make Them Into a Single Poet'

“He knows that every man who has some music in his soul can write poetry ten or twelve times in the natural course of his life, if the stars are propitious, but he does not propose to abuse that modest privilege.”

 

That sounds about right – ten or twelve times. Writing poems for most of us is a young man’s indulgence. They arrive with puberty, like pimples. Then we slowly come to our senses and, chastened by embarrassment, give it up and get a real job. Some sad souls never learn.

 

Borges is writing in his 1951 essay “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald,” about the English poet best known not for his own work but for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which he translated from the Persian in 1859. I remember carrying a pamphlet of the poem with me in junior high school as a sort of romance and/or poetry talisman. Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was a Persian astronomer and mathematician, as well as a poet, and was made immortal in English by Fitzgerald. Borges writes:

 

“Seven centuries go by with their enlightenments and agonies and transformations, and in England a man is born, FitzGerald, less intellectual than Omar, but perhaps more sensitive and sadder. FitzGerald knows that his true fate is literature, and he practices it with indolence and tenacity. He reads and rereads the Quixote, which seems to him almost the best of all books (but he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and ‘dear old Virgil’), and his love extends to the dictionary in which he looks for words.”

 

In his first edition, Fitzgerald translated Quatrain XI like this:

 

“Herewith 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.”

 

Here is the revised stanza from 1859, the better-known version I memorized as a kid:

 

“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!”

 

I didn’t know that enow means “enough.” These lines seemed like the height of guilt-free hedonism – another yearning we give up with puberty. Like so many writers in the English tradition, Fitzgerald is an eccentric, a sport of nature whose existence could never have been predicted. He is a memorably witty letter writer. Borges again:

 

“Around 1854 he is lent a manuscript collection of Omar’s compositions, arranged according to the alphabetical order of the rhymes; FitzGerald turns a few into Latin and glimpses the possibility of weaving them into a continuous and organic book that would begin with images of morning, the rose, and the nightingale, and end with those of night and the tomb. To this improbable and even unbelievable proposition, FitzGerald devotes his life, that of an indolent, solitary, maniacal man.”

 

Here is Borges distilling the case of Edward Fitzgerald:

 

“All collaboration is mysterious. That of the Englishman and the Persian was even more so, for the two were quite different, and perhaps in life might not have been friends; death and vicissitudes and time led one to know the other and make them into a single poet.”

 

Fitzgerald was born on this date, March 31, in 1809, and died in 1883 at age seventy-four.

 

[Cited above is Eliot Weinberger’s translation of the Borges essay in Selected Non-Fictions, 1999.]