دخل و تصرف فیتزجرالد در ترجمه انگلیسی رباعیات خیام

عمر خیام شاعر ناموری در زندگانی خود نبود. شاگرد او نظامی عروضی سمرقندی هم در کتاب چهارمقاله خود نام خیام را بین شاعران مطرح نکرده است. باید از ادوارد فیتزجرالد قدردانی کرد که به‌تنهایی شش‌ماه روی نسخه خطی رباعیات عمر خیام کار کرد و کنز مخفی را که هفتصد سال در زیر گرد‌و‌غبار انبوه متون ادبیات فارسی بود، کشف و به جهان ادب عرضه کرد. فیتزجرالد شهرت رباعیات خیام را به اقصای عالم رسانید؛ طوری‌که در قرن‌های نوزدهم و بیستم رباعیات خیام تقریباً به همه زبان‌های جهان ترجمه شد. ترجمه رباعیات خیام به زبان انگلیسی که به دست هنرمندانه فیتزجرالد صورت گرفته است، افزایش‌ها و کاهش‌هایی دارد. دراین مقاله به چند مورد از آنها خواهیم پرداخت.

The Rubaiyat Gained and the Rubaiyat Lost in Fitzgerald’s Translation

Omar Khayyam was not a poet of note in his life time. His pupil Nizami Samarqandi never mentioned him as a poet in his Chahar Maqaleh. Thanks to Edward Fitzgerald who single-mindedly worked on a manuscript of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for months together and discovered a poet in him who was hidden for seven hundred years under the thick dust of Persian literary texts. The English version of the Rubaiyat made Omar Khayyam a house-hold name and the 19th and 20th centuries began to witness translations of the Rubaiyat in almost all the languages of the world. The Rubaiyat of Khayyam artistically rendered into English by Fitzgerald has many literary gains and losses. The transaction has paid increasing return to English and diminishing return to Persian literature. English language has “capital letter” which Persian does not have. It invests a deeper meaning into the text when the “kohneh rebat” and “sobh o sham” are translated as “battered Caravanserai” and “Night and Day” in English. With the employment of capital letter in the English Rubaiyat, the text is transformed and transmuted from a prosaic one to a poetic one and it becomes more profound and deeper in meaning than the original Persian. Similar is the case with the poetic expressions: “Unborn tomorrow and Dead yesterday” in English when they replace the prosaic: “tomorrow that has not come and the past yesterday” of the original Persian. English translation displays a wide range of exclamations: Ah! Oh! Lo! , which do not punctuate the sombre Persian Rubaiyat of Khayyam.