Φιλοκλέων. Ἄκουε, μὴ φεῦγ'· ἐν Συβάρει γυνή ποτε 1. 1435
κατέαξ' ἐχῖνον.
Κατήγορος. Ταῦτ' ἐγὼ μαρτύρομαι.
Φι. Οὑχῖνος οὖν ἔχων τιν' ἐπεμαρτύρατο·
Εἶθ' ἡ Συβαρῖτις εἶπεν, εἰ ναὶ τὰν κόραν
τὴν μαρτυρίαν ταύτην ἐάσας, ἐν τάχει
ἐπίδεσμον ἐπρία, νοῦν ἂν εἶχες πλείονα.
«The Pot calls a bystander to be a witness to his bad treatment. The woman says, ‹If, by Proserpine, instead of all this «testifying» (comp. Cuddie and his mother in «Old Mortality!») you would buy yourself a rivet, it would show more sense in you!› The Scholiast explains echinus as ἀγγος τι ἐκ κεράμον.»
One more illustration for the oddity's sake from the «Autobiography of a Cornish Rector,» by the late James Hamley Tregenna. 1871.
«There was one old Fellow in our Company—he was so like a Figure in the ‹Pilgrim's Progress› that Richard always called him the ‹Allegory,› with a long white beard—a rare Appendage in those days—and a Face the colour of which seemed to have been baked in, like the Faces one used to see on Earthenware Jugs. In our Country-dialect Earthenware is called ‹Clome›; so the Boys of the Village used to shout out after him—‹Go back to the Potter, old Clome-face, and get baked over again.› For the ‹Allegory,› though shrewd enough in most things, had the reputation of being saift-baked, i.e., of weak intellect.»
(XC.) At the Close of the Fasting Month, Ramazan (which makes the Musulman unhealthy and unamiable), the first Glimpse of the New Moon (who rules their division of the Year) is looked for with the utmost Anxiety, and hailed with Acclamation. Then it is that the Porter's Knot may be heard—toward the Cellar. Omar has elsewhere a pretty Quatrain about the same Moon—
«Be of Good Cheer—the sullen Month will die,
And a young Moon requite us by and by:
Look how the Old one, meagre, bent, and wan
With Age and Fast, is fainting from the Sky!»
AN ANALYSIS OF
EDWARD FITZGERALD'S TRANSLATION
OF THE
QUATRAINS OF OMAR KHAYYAM
(Fifth Edition)
By EDWARD HERON-ALLEN
PREFACE
The object with which this volume has been compiled has been to set at rest, once and for ever, the vexed question of how far Edward FitzGerald's incomparable poem may be regarded as a translation of the Persian originals, how far as an adaptation, and how far as an original work. In the Introduction to my recently published translation of the Ouseley MS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and more particularly in the Essay which terminates the second edition of that work, I have dwelt at considerable length upon the history of Edward FitzGerald's poem and the influences of various Oriental works which are traceable in it. As it is doubtful whether the present volume will reach the hands of, or at any rate be critically considered by, any students of the poem who have not already had access to my former work, I do not think that it would be either expedient or useful to repeat in this place the information which is collected there, but a short history of the major portion of Edward FitzGerald's material is necessary, for the purpose of showing why this question of translation, adaptation, or original composition should have been a question open to lengthy argument, and why it has been impossible to set it at rest until the present time, when forty years have elapsed since first Edward FitzGerald's poem attracted the attention of those great scholars and poets who rescued it, as recounted in the threadbare anecdote, from the oblivion of the penny box.