Rubaiyat reproduces the spirit and color of the original, trans planting successfully into English verse the strange, outlandish imagery of the original. Fitzgerald's own conception of what a translation should be is well set forth in the preface to his Agammemnon of lEschylus. Here he maintained that in the absence of the perfect poet, who shall recreate in his own language the body and soul of his original, the best system is that of a pharaphase conserving the spirit of its author—a sort of literary metempsychosis. How well he has done this is apparent in his translation of Omar Klayy6,m. Whether it be judged as translation, or simply as a contribution to English poesy, one is enchanted by the quaint exotic Oriental imagery sprinkled all through the hundred and one Rubdiyat which Fitzgerald has given us. Even the elusive Springtime fra grance of the rose-scented Naishapilr garden pervades the whole book as it does those first verses--1- "Iram, indeed, is gone with all his Rose, And Jainshyd's §u'n-ring'd cup where no one knows; But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine, And many a Garden by the Water blows." Apropos of the lately published "Sufi Interpretation of Omar Khayyam," by Bjerregaard, there may yet be some who will class Omar among the SO, but Fitzgerald inter preted him as Epicurean, and accordingly the Fitzgerald Rubaiyat are Epicurean in tone; and it is as this sometimes merry, oftimes sad follower in the path of Epicurus and Lu cretius that we prefer to consider old Omar. Of Roman Epicureanism, which in its tendencies seems to have been almost, if not quite, identical with that of the more recent vanitas vanitatum philosophy of the Rubaiyat, we have an excellent account in Walter Pater's "Marius, the Epi curean." That old Roman doctrine, compounded of even older Greek philosophies, principally Heraclitus and• Aristip pus, of Cyrene, was almost identical with the doctrine of the famous Sophist, Protagoras—Pater fittingly terms it "a phil osophy of the despair of knowledge." In essence it taught
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