This week, a diminutive motherboard of a Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, courtesy of Vanessa Hodkinson.
“To a modern reader, the rubáiyát reeks of everything Edward Said couldn’t stand: languor, hedonism, a vaguely academically underwritten Orientalist rambling”. Really, it’s a selection of poems, chosen from over a thousand fragments, dealing with universal themes of life, death, love and religion, “brought… into a ‘whole’ that had its own internal arc, one never prescribed by Khayyam”. Marina Warner suggests (lrb, 9 April 2009) that, if the rubáiyát “reads as if its lines have always existed, this is an effect of the echo chamber of FitzGerald’s mind”.
After FitzGerald’s 1851 confection of twelfth century Persian poems, there have been dozens of interpretations and re-presentations. In Chinese alone, there are forty-eight translations.
Hodkinson describes how “in the early twentieth century, when the popularity of the rubáiyát was at its height, the most easily affordable of its many versions was also one of its most portable: the miniature book”.
The miniature book may seem a “distant memory, preserved by collectors and societies that meet annually in mid-west American hotels”. But today we condense information into ever smaller casings, dealing with miniature texts on smartphones, apps, tickets and disclaimers.
Click here to make your very own miniature Rubaiyat.
Khayyam’s Rubaiyat may “reek of orientalism” but this week, I wanted to share a miniature, motherboard, Do It Yourself version, courtesy of Vanessa Hodgkinson.
Who’s the bravest? Who’s going to make the most beautiful Rubaiyat?