Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Omar Khayam's bible for drunkards

Finally, the Times of London publishes Mehdi Aminrazavi to expose the fallacy and grotesque transalations by Edward FitzGerald’s of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains. Instead of a hedonistic drunkard, we find Khayam to be a man of God and spirtuality, not the deviant soul looking at the world through Shirazi grape juice.

Now if only some scholar would do the same for Coleman Bark's gay (and here I mean the original meaning fo the word) transalation of Maualan Jalauddin Rumi's Masnavi. Here is a good site on translating his original poetry at Dar-ul-Masnavi

An example is here
"Come again, please, come again, Whoever you are. Religious, infidel, heretic or pagan. Even if you promised a hundred times And a hundred times you broke your promise, This door is not the door Of hopelessness and frustration. This door is open for everybody. Come, come as you are."

[accurate translation: "Return (in repentance), return! Whatever you are, return! Even if you are an unbeliever or a Magian or an idol worshipper, return! This court of ours is not a court of despair. Even if you have broken your repentance a hundred times, return!"]

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