That his success was partly due to an inborn gift for rendering verse is proved by FitzGerald’s high, though not equal felicity, as a translator of poets so different as Æschylus, Calderon, and Omar Khayyám. But partly also it was due to a very liberal theory of translation, outlined by himself in the prefaces to Calderon and the Agamemnon. In the former he says, ‘I have, while faithfully trying to retain what was fine and efficient, sunk, reduced, altered, and replaced much that seemed not; simplified some perplexities, and curtailed or omitted scenes that seemed to mar the general effect, supplying such omissions by some lines of after-narrative; and in some measure have tried to compensate for the fulness of sonorous Spanish, which Saxon English at least must forego, by a compression which has its own charms to Saxon ears.’ The extent to which he allowed himself liberties may be partly gauged by the differences between the first and fourth editions of the Rubáiyát. In short, FitzGerald was more properly a paraphrast than a translator. He got into his mind a conception of the central meaning of the work and of the author’s character where, as in the case of Omar, that was of importance as a key to the meaning; and he then, without troubling himself about exact equivalence of word or phrase, or even of whole sections, proceeded to create a similar impression in the new language. Hence his work is wholly free from the impression of cramped movement so common in translations.
With reference to Omar, FitzGerald had first to decide whether his quatrains were to be interpreted literally, or as the utterances of a mystic Sufism, in which the wine so frequently sung of really meant Deity, and all the sensual images covered a spiritual meaning. Fortunately, he decided for the former alternative; and whatever the real Omar may have been, FitzGerald’s Omar is an epicurean. The original Omar has been compared to Lucretius; as FitzGerald represents him he is far more suggestive of Horace. His touch is lighter than the elder Roman’s; and he has no system, nor any ambition to frame one. Rather it is his conviction of the futility of systems that makes him what he is. He is a thoughtful man, questioning the meaning of life, finding no answer except in the philosophy of ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die,’ and drawing thence the inevitable melancholy it must impart to the reflective mind.
‘There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see;
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was—and then no more of Thee and Me.’
Herein lies the charm of his epicureanism, and herein too its kinship with that of Horace. In both, the moral, carpe diem, is the advice of men who, in spite of themselves, must live for more than the day.
Thanks to the deeply human element in his philosophy, Horace after nineteen centuries is one of the most modern of poets. He has been emphatically the guide of the man of the world, whose experience, as it broadens, more and more convinces him of the poet’s truth. FitzGerald’s Omar has the same modern tone, perhaps in a degree even higher. His necessitarianism is modern, his scepticism is modern, and the difficulties in which it arises are modern too. His stinging quatrains answer a theology familiar enough to the readers of Burns, and seem to breathe the spirit of the Scotch poet’s satires on the Kirk:
‘Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!
‘Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man
Is blacken’d—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!’
Except perhaps in America, FitzGerald is not yet appreciated as he ought to be. When he is so appreciated he will rank only under the greatest of his time, and his chief work will be classed little below their best.