BORGES’ «THE ENIGMA

OF EDWARD By Merve ŞENOL ÖZDEMİR

FITZGERALD»
REVIEW OF «THE ENIGMA OF
EDWARD FITZGERALD»
“The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald” is a heart-warming essay by Jorge Luis
Borges on the mysterious collaboration of the writer of an original work and
the translator. The text includes two long, parallel paragraphs, the first about
Umar ben Ibrahim al Khayyami, the second about Edward FitzGerald. These
two paragraphs are followed by two shorter ones where Borges expresses
how the two writers conjoined.
Each long paragraph regarding the life of each writer feels like a “miniature
fictional narrative” of the lives of the two writers as put forward by Sergio
Waisman (Waisman, 2005). Despite being radically different from each other,
the two men, as described by Borges, merge into one to compose the new
version of the Rubaiyat in English.
Borges starts with the narrative of
the Persion mathematician, scholar,
and poet, Umar ben Ibrahim al
Khayyami, who was born in the
eleventh century of the Christian era
(the fifth century of the
Muhammedan Hegira).
In the second paragraph, Borges
introduces the life and works of the
Victorian poet and translator Edward
FitzGerald (1809-93), who was born
seven centuries after Omar
Khayyami.
Borges points out that FitzGerald
reads Don Quijote over and over
again, which may seem parallel to
Omar’s studies of the Quran. It is
learned from Borges that FitzGerald
is friends with many famous people
including Tennyson, Dickens, and
Thackeray; however, “he feels
himself no way inferior to them,
despite his modesty and courtesy”
(Borges, 1967).
FitzGerald dedicates his life to
combining the series of quatrains,
and reorganizes them into a single,
coherent text. With the publication of
the first version of Rubaiyat, which
is followed by others, Borges states
that “a miracle happens: from the
lucky conjunction of a Persian
astronomer who ventures into poetry
and an English eccentric who
explores Spanish and Oriental texts,
without understanding them entirely,
emerges an extraordinary poet who
resembles neither of them” (Borges,
1967).
Borges maintains that in translating Omar,
“FitzGerald interpolated, refined, and invented.
He goes on expressing that the author of
Rubaiyat is neither Khayyam nor FitzGerald
and adds (Borges, 1967):
Pythagorean doctrine of the transition of the
soul through many incarnations; with the
passing of the centuries, his soul possibly found
its reincarnation in England to fulfill, in a
remote Germanic language with Latin
overtones, the literary destiny that in Nishapur
had been pushed aside by mathematics…
Perhaps the spirit of Umar lodged, around 1857,
in FitzGerald’s.
Eleni Kefala points out in her book
that “the notion of ‘spirit’ of a poet,
which goes through multiple
reincarnations, is a recurring concept
in Borges” (Kefala, 2007). Also in
his essay “The Flower of Coleridge”,
“Borges playfully comments that for
years he used to think that all
literature was in one man” (cited in
Kefala, 2007).
What can be understood from the
expression “all literature was in one
man” is that Borges believed in a
universal literature brought and
transformed by the infinite
reincarnations of the greatest Poet
and Writer of all, God.
 It can be concluded from Borges’
essay regarding Edward FitzGerald
and his translation of Omar
Borges’s understanding of creating is
Khayyam’s Rubaiyat that translation
achieved by writing as translation.
produces texts that are not inferior to
Susana Romanu-Sued suggests in
their originals, and that the translated
her book La Escritura en la
text becomes the original and may
Diáspora: Poéticas du Traducción
even surpass the original text in the
[Writing in Diaspora: The Poetics of
language and the culture it is
Translation]: “throughout his
translated into. The collaboration
critical and fictional work, Borges
between the original author and the
has sustained the idea of a culture as
translator is a mysterious one, as in
a universe of translations, where
the case of Omar Khayyami and
writing would be a permanent
Edward FitzGerald, who translated
rewriting of texts coming from other
and even re-wrote an original text in
languages and other cultures” (cited
English seven centuries after the
in Kefala, 2007).
original author.
In Borges words: “any collaboration is mysterious. This
one, of an English man and a Persian, was so more than any
other, because the two were very different, and in life might
not have achieved friendship; it was death and vicissitude
and time that brought it about that one should know of the
other and both become a single poet” (Borges, 1967).
THANK YOU