The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald by Jorge Luis Borges
The essay by Jorge Luis Borges delves into the intriguing collaboration between a writer and translator, focusing on the enigmatic partnership between Umar ben Ibrahim al Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald in creating the English version of the Rubaiyat. Borges weaves a narrative that merges the lives of these two distinct figures, highlighting the transformative power of translation and the emergence of a new poetic voice transcending individual identities.
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BORGES THE ENIGMA OF EDWARD By Merve ENOL ZDEM R FITZGERALD
REVIEW OF THE ENIGMA OF EDWARD FITZGERALD The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald is a heart-warming essay by Jorge Luis Borges on the mysterious collaboration of the writer of an original work and the translator. The text includes two long, parallel paragraphs, the first about Umar ben Ibrahim al Khayyami, the second about Edward FitzGerald. These two paragraphs are followed by two shorter ones where Borges expresses how the two writers conjoined. Each long paragraph regarding the life of each writer feels like a miniature fictional narrative of the lives of the two writers as put forward by Sergio Waisman (Waisman, 2005). Despite being radically different from each other, the two men, as described by Borges, merge into one to compose the new version of the Rubaiyat in English.
Borges starts with the narrative of the Persion mathematician, scholar, and poet, Umar ben Ibrahim al Khayyami, who was born in the eleventh century of the Christian era (the fifth century of the Muhammedan Hegira). In the second paragraph, Borges introduces the life and works of the Victorian poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (1809-93), who was born seven centuries after Omar Khayyami.
Borges points out that FitzGerald reads Don Quijote over and over again, which may seem parallel to Omar s studies of the Quran. It is learned from Borges that FitzGerald is friends with many famous people including Tennyson, Dickens, and Thackeray; however, he feels himself no way inferior to them, despite his modesty and courtesy (Borges, 1967). FitzGerald dedicates his life to combining the series of quatrains, and reorganizes them into a single, coherent text. With the publication of the first version of Rubaiyat, which is followed by others, Borges states that a miracle happens: from the lucky conjunction of a Persian astronomer who ventures into poetry and an English eccentric who explores Spanish and Oriental texts, without understanding them entirely, emerges an extraordinary poet who resembles neither of them (Borges, 1967).
Borges maintains that in translating Omar, FitzGerald interpolated, refined, and invented. He goes on expressing that the author of Rubaiyat is neither Khayyam nor FitzGerald and adds (Borges, 1967): Pythagorean doctrine of the transition of the soul through many incarnations; with the passing of the centuries, his soul possibly found its reincarnation in England to fulfill, in a remote Germanic language overtones, the literary destiny that in Nishapur had been pushed mathematics Perhaps lodged, around 1857, in FitzGerald s. with Latin aside by the spirit of Umar
Eleni Kefala points out in her book that the notion of spirit of a poet, which goes through multiple reincarnations, is a recurring concept in Borges (Kefala, 2007). Also in his essay The Flower of Coleridge , Borges playfully comments that for years he used to think that all literature was in one man (cited in Kefala, 2007). What can be understood from the expression all literature was in one man is that Borges believed in a universal literature brought and transformed by the infinite reincarnations of the greatest Poet and Writer of all, God.
It can be concluded from Borges essay regarding Edward FitzGerald and his translation of Omar Khayyam s Rubaiyat that translation produces texts that are not inferior to their originals, and that the translated text becomes the original and may even surpass the original text in the language and the culture it is translated into. The collaboration between the original author and the translator is a mysterious one, as in the case of Omar Khayyami and Edward FitzGerald, who translated and even re-wrote an original text in English seven centuries after the original author. Borges s understanding of creating is achieved by writing as translation. Susana Romanu-Sued suggests in her book La Escritura en la Di spora: Po ticas du Traducci n [Writing in Diaspora: The Poetics of Translation]: throughout his critical and fictional work, Borges has sustained the idea of a culture as a universe of translations, where writing would be a permanent rewriting of texts coming from other languages and other cultures (cited in Kefala, 2007).
In Borges words: any collaboration is mysterious. This one, of an English man and a Persian, was so more than any other, because the two were very different, and in life might not have achieved friendship; it was death and vicissitude and time that brought it about that one should know of the other and both become a single poet (Borges, 1967).
