Page 4 - Omar!

trivial historical events and persons. My company, whose views I
think I fairly represent, does regret the lack of original material
available for performance, but we are pleased with Musselman’s
adaptation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”
“The what?”
“It is a collection of quatrains, four-line epigrams, questionably
attributed to one man, the greatest mathematician and astronomer of
his era. They expressed his personal philosophy, more or less, and
made him also the greatest poet of his era. The English translation by
Edward FitzGerald was in vogue in Victorian and Edwardian times,
but most people nowadays have forgotten about it or don’t get past
the nineteenth-century idioms. Sonny Musselman, the eccentric
Brazilian timber merchant, took a fancy to the work and decided it
was his mission to present it to the world anew as an opera. He
composed it and he financed it. Residing in Rio de Janeiro, he
unfortunately does not read the reviews in American newspapers
with any regularity or timeliness.”
The board chairman swallowed Fey’s remarks whole, impatiently
skipping digestion of what smacked of digression.
“That brings me to one of the first groups to complain: the Omar
Khayyam Society, which has a branch in town. Never heard of them
before; the police told me they’re just a bunch of old atheists and
free-thinkers, no teeth at all. But they’ve really got their hackles up:
claim you—that is, the composer—completely butchered their sacred
text; then say they had great expectations of the production, but now
they’re going to turn out in force—however many that could be!—
and picket the theatre.”
“Nonsense,” replied Barnaby Fey, at maximum vehemence. “They
ought to know FitzGerald’s arrangement of the quatrains followed
his own whims. Nobody knows how Omar originally sequenced the
verses; and, to large extent, it doesn’t matter, since they repeat the
same theme in subseries of varying size. Furthermore, the translator
took liberties in combining disparate phrases of the original into one
stanza—and, of course, there are the spurious bits, added later by
people whose world-view differed greatly from Omar’s. To my mind,
Musselman’s re-ordering for dramatic coherence does no harm to the
poet’s intent and actually enhances the emotional impact by
providing a semi-linear framework to—”

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