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

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