Page:Quatrains of Omar Khayyam (tr. Whinfield, 1883).djvu/45

Rh and where nearly the whole charm consists in the style and the manner, the grace of the expression and the melody of the versification. A literal prose version of such poetry must needs be unsatisfactory, because it studiously ignores the chief points in which the attractiveness of the original consists, and deliberately renounces all attempt to reproduce them.

In deciding on the form to be taken by a new translation of Omar, the fact of the existence of a previous verse translation of universally acknowledged merit ought not, of course, to be left out of account. The successor of a translator like Mr. Fitzgerald, who ventures to write verse, and especially verse of the metre which he has handled with such success, cannot help feeling at almost every step that he is provoking comparisons very much to his own disadvantage. But I do not think this consideration ought to deter him from using the vehicle which everything else indicates as the proper one.

As regards metre, there is no doubt that the quatrain of ten-syllable lines which has been tried by Hammer, Bicknell, and others, and has been raised by Mr. Fitzgerald almost to the rank of a recognised English metre, is the best representative of the Rubá'í. It fairly satisfies Conington's canon, viz. that there ought to be some degree of metrical conformity between the measure of the original and the translation, for though it does not exactly correspond with the Rubá'í, it very clearly suggests it. In particular, it copies what is perhaps the most marked feature of the Rubá'í,—the interlinking of the four lines by the repetition in the fourth