Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
A translation?/interpretation
by Edward FitzGerald (1859).

I have only memorized this first quatrain of Fitzgerald’s wonderful translation/interpretation of Khayyám’s epic and sublime poem.

A vast amount of the World’s Greatest Literture
lies uncreated in the English Language.
In fact, a unfathonable amount of such great literature was created before the English language (as we know it) even existed.
And in dialects now lost to us.

Therefore, unless we can speak every language and dialect ever created we can’t access a massive amount of Art/Literature.
Even then, it would be possible to encompass only a small amount of it.
However, there have been valiant attempts to bring such works
into our own Language and Culture.
– even as this meets the problems of interpretation.

Omar Khayyám

Below: just 3 of FitzGerald several attempts
to interpret just the first quatrain:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultán’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
FitzGerald, Stanza I, 1st ed.

---

“Wake ! For the Sun behind yon Eastern height
Has chased the Session of the Stars from Night ;
And, to the field of Heav’n ascending, strikes
The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.
FitzGerald, Stanza I, 2nd ed

---

WAKE! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes
The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.
FitzGerald, Stanza I, 5th ed

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FitzGerald probably worked, reworked, refined, and re-edited
Khayyám sublime epic poem until the day he died.
And then was still unlikely content.
Even as we sense what was likely
‘a labour of love’on his part

---

 

“He’s not really dead, as long as we remember him.”
– Dr. McCoy, (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, 1982)

Though I once knocked my sister out with the ‘Vulcan neck pinch‘
(that’s my story and I’m sticking to it),
I never considered myself a Trekkie –(Star Trek Super Fan),
cuz I could never do the Vulcan Salute/Greeting.
(I’m also lousy at Mind Melding).

Below are most of the places I’ve lived in Southern Alberta:
Except Vulcan.

So I’ve always considered myself to be an Albertan.
And I know Big Town and Small Town, Alberta.
Which brings us to Vulcan, Alberta which under ordinary circumstances
would be considered to be your typical small Alberta Prairie Farm town.
BUT nothing ever seems to have been ‘Typical’ about Vulcan.
Firstly, it’s unusual name:
“Vulcan was named by a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway back in 1915 for the Roman god of fire—all of the streets throughout the town were originally named for gods and goddesses …
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/vulcan#:~:text=Vulcan%20was%20named%20by%20a,who%20mostly%20work%20in%20farming.
Also …
Wikipedia says:
“Vulcan once had nine grain elevators, more than any other location west of Winnipeg, Manitoba, making it the largest grain
shipping point at that time.”

I remember locomotives like this below.

There are 57,200 farms in Alberta.

Next: Part 3 …