What was the role of German scholars in this regard?
H.A.R. Gibb assigned to Germany the chief responsibility for adapting Islamic poetry to European Romanticism. Herder’s Orientalism had been at first largely a humanistic response to a newly discovered chapter of history, but when Jones’s translations became available to him, he made adaptations of Persian and Indian works that were to pave the way for the Romantic flowering of the orientalische richtung, oriental direction, in Goethe, Ruckert, Platen, and Dodenstedt. The interest in Persian poetry, revealed by so important a figure in German cultural history as the philosopher Hegel, testifies to the new uses to which the foreign literary importations were being put. German philosophy, now given over to organicism, intuitionism, and even mysticism, found an ally in Persian Sufism. Meanwhile German philologists such as Tholuck, von Hammer-Purgstall, Brockhause, and Rosenzweig-Schwannau were producing texts and translations of Persian literature for the use of not only German but also English and American writers.
How did Germans pave the way for British and American scholarship in Persian literature?
The leading popularizers of Persian literature in England and America in the mid-nineteenth century often took their stimulus from the Germans. Edward B. Cowell, who taught Fitzgerald to read Persian, owed his later interpretations to German sources; Samuel Robinson, a businessman who was an amateur of Persian, owed both texts and translations to them. The two most widely read anthologies of Asian literature – Louisa Costello’s The Rose-Garden of Persia in England, and William R. Alger’s The Poetry of the Orient in America – continued numerous English translations of German versions of Persian poetry. It was under German influence that the mystic Rumi began to be noticed. Hafez, formerly the Persian lyrist was now the voice of weeping and loud lament. Before the Romantic Agony played itself out, he was to become the hero of the fin de siecle decadents. Even in Transcendentalist America, which was generally resistant to such tendencies, the wine of Hafez was no longer simply “Moore’s best Port,” but stood for intellectual emancipation and expansion of the mind.
How do you regard the role of adapters of others’ translations such as Goethe, Arnold, and Emerson?
Such adapters gave the substance of Persian literature its widest currency. Against such license, academic scholars, e.g. Brown, Nicholson, Arberry, Levy, and Jackson, had a rectifying influence and translated a number of works. The sahibs of the British colonial enterprise were responsible for the most substantial activity in translation. Civil servants like Herman Bicknell and H. Wilberforce-Clarke translated Hafez in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Governmental agents, e.g. Francis Gladwin, James Ross, and Edward B. Eastwick, produced various translations of the Golestan. Alexander Rogers’s translation of Ferdowsi, Jami, the Anvar-e Soheyli and other works had a similar origin, as did Sir Edwin Arnold’s translations and adaptations. British colonialism in Asia provided a training ground for the linguistic skills required in translation, and also guaranteed a reading audience. The fairly limited American contributions to this body of Near Eastern literature point up this governing geopolitical influence in Western Orientalism.
A number of the cultivators of Persian literature were amateurs, e.g. Gertrude L. Bell and John Payne whose translations of Hafez became popular in the beginning of the twentieth century. Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, published in the second half of the 19th century, was undoubtedly the most important development in the English history of Persian literature and served as the basis for translating the quatrains into different languages of the world. FitzGerald’s version acquired a life of its own that had a strong impression on the social and philosophical attitudes of several generations of European readers. This version became for more than half a century the most popular poem in that language. Understandably, though erroneously, it was regarded as an English poem.
How did FitzGerald’s version affect the Western audience and also the translations of other poets?
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the general audience mistakenly identified Khayyam with their distorted and misrepresented picture of Epicure and as a result related to the Quatrains. As a result, all other Persian poets except Ferdowsi were seen in its light. Hafez was viewed as a later Khayyam, a skeptic and a hedonist. The same was done by Thomas Wright, to Sa’di, whose simple and unpretentious philosophy could hardly suit the vogue. Lesser known figures like Baba Taher and Kamal al-Din were pulled completely out of their orbits by the magnetism of Khayyam. It was because of A.J. Arberry that Rumi’s quatrains resisted the status quo. However the fame of FitzGerald’s translation directed the attention of scholars of Persian to the author, who had so far regarded him as mainly a scientist-mathematician. New translations of the Quatrains appeared to rectify the distortions. This activity reached its climax with Robert Grave and Ali shah’s translation which appeared in late 1960s. The new translation used a Sufi lexicon to interpret the wine, the saki and other sensuous images and thus depicted the picture of a pious mystic of Khayyam. This was the latest of a series of backlashes against the hedonistic and skeptical stress which was placed on Khayyam’s thought by FitzGerald and his followers.
Were there any attempts to find a FitzGerald for Rumi, Hafez, Ferdowsi or other poets?
Yes, but they met with no success. Ferdowsi and Nezami were received special attention from art critics interested in the illuminated manuscripts of their works; Rumi and ‘Attar have been appropriated by advocates of the Sufi path; and Jami’s Yusof and Zuleykha in a German translation inspired the great novelist Thomas Mann for his Joseph in Egypt. The point is that no translation from the Persian has met with a literary success comparable to FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat. Even FitzGerald failed to do for Jami and ‘Attar what he did for Khayyam. His Salāmān and Absāl was rendered, as he himself admitted, in too Miltonic a blank verse, and more of the original was left out than kept, asArberry’s later study shows. His Bird-Parliament, a version of the Manteq al-tayr, was rightly described by him as only a paraphrase of a summary of the original.
Could we conclude that there have not been important translations of the leading Persian writers, or is it too hasty a conclusion?
I don’t think so. Academic scholarship has given us a complete English translation of Persian masterpieces, such as: ‘Attār’s Manteq al-tayr (conference of the birds) by Darbandi and Davis; FitzGeral; Mansani; Garcin de Tassy; Nott; Elāhi-nāme (The Divine Book) by Fuad Rouhani; Boyle; Ferdowsi’s The Shahname (The Book of Kings) by Levy; Warner Brothers; Atkinson; Mohl; Pizzi; Rückert; Rogers; Robinson; Zimmern; Picard; Gugāni’s Vis and Ramin by Morrison; Masse; Hfez by Hammer-Purgstall; Rosenzweig-Schwannau; Wilberforce-Clarke; Payne; Bicknell; Bell; Leaf; Arberry; Avery and Heath-Stubbs; Hillmann; Jami’s Salaman and Absal by Arberry; Jami’s Yusof and Zulaikha by Griffith; Robinson; Rogers; Yohannan; Khayyam’s Rubaiyat by FitzGerald; Payne; Arnot; Arberry; Graves and Ali-Shah; Dole; Avery and Heath-Stubbs; Nezami’s Haft Paikar (The Seven Beauties) by Wilson; Gelpke; Bausani; Wilberforce-Clarke; Laila and Majnun by Atkinson; Gelpke; Khosrow and Shirin by Masse; Burgel; Makhzan al-Asrar (The treasury of mysteries by Darab; Rumi’s The Mathnavi by Nicholson; Arberry; Whinefield; Ghazaliyyāt-e Shams by Nicholson; Arberry; Moyne and Barks; Schimmel; Sa’di’s Bustan by Wickens; Wilberforece-Clarke; Davie; Rückert: Sa’di’s Gulestan (The Rose Garden) by Wilberforce-Clarke; Rehatsek; Ross; Eastwick; Arberry; Rückert; Shabestari’s Gulshan-e Rāz (The Mystic Rose Garden) by Whinfield; Johnson; Baba Taher by Heron-Allen and Brenton; Zakani’s Mush-o-Gorbe by Pound; Arberry; Farzād; Mu’ayyed; Zakani’s Akhlaq al-Ashraf (The Ethics of the Aristocrats) by Javadi; Iskandar-name (Alexander Romance) by Southgate; ‘Attār’s Tadhkirat al-Awliyā (Muslim Saints and Mystics) by ARberry; Bighami’s Darab-name by Hanaway; Khodādād’s Samak-e Ayyār by Razavi; Kay Kavus ibn Eskandar’s Qābus-nāme by Levy; Nezam al-Mulk’s Siyāsat-nāme (The Book of Government) by Darke; Nezāmi ‘Aruzi’s chahar Maqala (four discourses) by Browne; Gastines; Rumi’s Maqālāt (Discourses) by Arberry; Tusi’s Akhlāq-e Nāseri (The Nasirean Ethics) by Wickens; Varavini’s Marzban-nāme by Levy; Jovayni’s Tārikh-e Jahān-goshā (The History of the World Conqueror) by Boyle; Jami’s Bahārestan by Wilson; Rehatsek; Masse; Schlechta-Wisserhrd. It was just a far incomplete list of scholarly and Academic translations of Persian classics into European Languages.
It should be noted in passing that in the prose works, a number of which were just enumerated, the essential element is content. In lyric poetry, on the other hand, form is of the essence. The truly puzzling question in the translation of Persian literature has been what to do with the ghazal form, i.e. why Hafez has always been the critical figure.
