Carpe Diem #1296 Dawn's Left Hand

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Welcome at the second episode of November 2017 in which we are exploring "The Rubaiyat" by Omar Khayyam. "The Rubaiyat" is a collection of 101 quatrains, a four lined verse with rhyme in the 1st, 2nd and 4th line.

Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet and scholar and his poems were only discovered far after his death in 1131. "The Rubaiyat" is a renown collection, but Khayyam didn't write only these 101 quatrains. It is said that he wrote a lot of them.

Today's episode I have titled "dawn's left hand" and it's extracted from the 2nd quatrain of "The Rubaiyat". Let me first give you the 'original' quatrain in the first translation by Edward FitzGerald:

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

© Omar Khayyam (Tr. FitzGerald)

"Dawn's Left Hand"

Background:

The False Dawn is certainly a reference to the zodiacal light. It is now known to result from the reflection of sunlight from interplanetary debris in the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (the ecliptic), and so is more especially visible (in the northern hemisphere) after sunset in spring and before dawn in autumn, at lower latitudes, where and when the plane of the ecliptic is more steeply inclined to the horizon. Being relatively faint, it is also more easily seen in places where the air is clear and free from the light pollution of modern cities. Hence in Omar Khayyam’s time and place, it would have been a much more visible phenomenon than it is for most of us today. As indicated above, in the northern hemisphere, it is visible both before sunrise (especially in September/October) and after sunset (especially in March/April), but only its morning appearance has ever been of any significance to Islam, as it can give a false message to the faithful about the onset of the true dawn, when the morning prayers begin, and especially during Ramadan, when both prayer and fasting begin. The phenomenon is referred to, somewhat obscurely, in Surah 2.187 of the Qur’an: “Eat and drink until the white thread of dawn appears to you distinct from its black thread, then complete your fast till the night appears.” (translation Abdullah Yusuf Ali) 

false dawn

In this verse is the first of many references to the Tavern and drinking wine, the recurring theme of the poem being “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, and there is NOTHING after death.” The last two lines use Cup in a dual sense – “fill the Cup” in the third line means “pour a cup of wine to drink”, whilst the Cup in the last line is the first of many symbolic references to human beings, Cups being made from Clay as Adam was made from Clay by God.The life disappearing from the body of a human being at death is likened to the wine drying out in a cup.

Maybe you remember our CDHK month about Persian poetry. In that month we read poems by the Persian poet Hafiz. Hafiz wrote a lot of poems and there are even poems in which he describes the use of "morning wine".

[...] The dawn advances veiled with roses.

Bring the morning draught, my friends, the morning draught! [...] (Hafiz)

Whilst the morning draught might seem quite civilised to many of us, the injunction, made later in the same ode, to “drink…incessantly the pure wine” seems considerably more worrying! But then Hafiz did live in the days before a glass of wine counted as two units of a suggested weekly intake, and, in any case, his injunction may be a Sufic one, a striving for increasingly Divine Intoxication! 

In the time of Khayyam it was a common use to drink wine in the early morning especially around the Ramadan.

Persian Wine Ewer

In a later translation of "The Rubaiyat" this verse was translated in another way, more accesible for the reader:

Before the phantom of False morning died, 

Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried, 

"When all the Temple is prepared within, 

"Why nods the drowsy Worshiper outside?"

Well ... a nice verse I would say, but drinking wine in the early morning isn't my "cup of tea", but in a way it attracted me to use it in my haiku for this episode:

at dawn
wine sparkles in the sun
night's left over

© Chèvrefeuille

Hm ... I like this one, how immodest, but it is true. This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7:00 PM (CET) and will remain open until November 8th at noon (CET). I will publish our new episode later on. For now ... have fun!

(Sources: wikipedia; bob forrest web)

Carpe Diem #1295 Bowl of Night

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Welcome at the first (delayed) post of our new CDHK month. This month is titled "Rubaiyat, Another Way" and it is all about "The Rubaiyat" by Omar Khayyam, a Persian (nowdays Iranian) poet and  scholar. However this month it's mostly about his "The Rubaiyat", a compilation of quatrains. By the way "rubaiyat" means quatrain. Let me first introduce Khayyam to you in a brief biography.

Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. As a scholar, he is most notable for his work on cubic equations and his calendar reform. Omar was born in Nishapur, in northeastern Iran. He moved to Samarkand at a young age and obtained his education there. Afterwards he moved to Bukhara and became established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the Islamic Golden Age. His treatise on algebra (Maqāla fi l-jabr wa l-muqābala) includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle. There is a tradition of attributing poetry to Omar Khayyam, written in the form of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt رباعیات). This poetry became widely known due to the English translation by Edward FitzGerald (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859), which enjoyed great success in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle.

Omar Khayyam

The authenticity of the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam is highly uncertain. Omar was famous during his lifetime not as a poet but as an astrologer and mathematician. A reference to his having written poetry is found in his biography by Al-Qifti, written about a century after his death, but the oldest securely dated manuscripts containing poetry attributed to him date to the 15th century.

The number of quatrains attributed to him varies from about 1,200 to more than 2,000. Skeptic scholars point out that the entire tradition may be pseudepigraphic. The extant manuscripts containing collections attributed to Omar are much too late to enable a reconstruction of a body of authentic verses. Iranian scholars, notably Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, in the 1930s attempted to reconstruct a core of authentic verses from scattered quotes by authors of the 13th and 14th centuries, ignoring the younger manuscript tradition. After World War II, reconstruction efforts were significantly delayed by two clever forgeries. De Blois (2004) is pessimistic, suggesting that contemporary scholarship has not advanced beyond the situation of the 1930s, when Hans Heinrich Schaeder commented that the name of Omar Khayyam "is to be struck out from the history of Persian literature".

Cover of the first edition of "The Rubaiyat" published in America (1879)

I hadn't heard from Khayyam until recently as I was reading the prompt suggestion section. I ran into a suggestion made by Bjorn Rudberg and that was my first "contact" with "The Rubaiyat" by Omar Khayyam. I don't know a lot about him, so I decided to use other sources as for example 'wikipedia' to create the posts for this month.

The quatrains which will be used this month are extracted from the translation by Edward FitzGerald. I will try to tell you something about the background of the quatrains and the possible deeper meaning.

Okay ... let's go to the first verse of "The Rubaiyat" which I have titled "Bowl of Night". In our last episode of October I presented that first verse already ... just to give you the possibility to relate to the form and the choice of words. 

A quatrain is a verse containing of four lines, the first, second and fourth line are rhyming. That will be new for you maybe, because in Japanese poetry like haiku and tanka, we use rhyme not very often. To me this makes it more difficult to create haiku or tanka inspired on the quatrains this month, but we will see how this month will evolve.

Here is the first quatrain of "The Rubaiyat":

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 Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light. 

© Omar Khayyam (Tr. Fitzgerald)

As I read this verse I was immediately caught by that first word in capital, AWAKE! What does it mean? It occurred to me as a strong call to listen ... and that's maybe what it is ... so AWAKE! and explore "The Rubaiyat" with me.

The Sleeve of Night, Edmund Dulac

Background:

Sunrise. The Sun (the Stone), when it rises (is flung) into the Sky (the Bowl of Night), causes the Stars to become invisible (it puts them to flight). According to FitzGerald’s note on this verse, “Flinging a Stone into the Cup was the Signal for ‘To Horse!’ in the Desert.” The image thus likens the start of the day to the start of a journey. The Hunter of the East is, again, the rising Sun, the Noose of Light being the hunter’s lasso.

This verse is a prime example of the assertion that the freshness and originality of the first edition of The Rubaiyat was rather spoiled by the revisions made in subsequent editions. The flinging of the stone into the bowl was particularly problematic, and may even have arisen from a scribal misreading of the original Persian, but the image was, as FitzGerald put it: “so pretty and so smacks of the Desert Life….that it is worth risking it.” 

In another edition of "The Rubaiyat" in a translation by Edward FitzGerald the verse reads as follows:

Wake! For the Sun, who scattered into flight

The Stars before him from the Field of Night,

Drives Night along with them from Heaven, and strikes

The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

I think this translation is more common and gives us a better opportunity to understand this verse. It describes the scene of a new day, the sun rises, the stars disappear, that's the sign to awake and go on your way again, to your work for example.

Sunrise Yosemite

It will not be easy to create a haiku inspired on this verse, this quatrain, but here it is, my attempt to create a haiku inspired on this verse:

at sunrise
stars disappear
alive again

© Chèvrefeuille (experimental haiku)

Sorry for this long episode, but I had to tell you something more about Omar Khayyam and "The Rubaiyat". 

(sources: wikipedia; bob forrest web)

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until November 8th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode later on.

PS.: The prompt-list for this month is not ready, so the upcoming days I hope to surprise you.