Alexey wrote:
One remembers
a philological anecdote from one's student days:
A person on a
"How much
watch?"
"Two
watch."
"Such
much!"
This joke, or one very similar,
received perhaps its widest currency from its occurrence in the film
SKB
wrote:
IF
you insist that “American” means or subsumes “product of American cultural values and
educational systems” we are locked in a typical semantic loop!
Well, if “American” means anything I would have
thought that that is what it means. Otherwise “American” might as well mean
anything that happens to be in
Carolyn wrote, re my
post Fri, 24 Apr
1998:
Dear
Charles,
Odd that you didn't notice my references recently to the
possibility that VN may have owned the 1947 Cresset edition of Hogg's
"Memoirs"
Dear Carolyn, I much regret that
these days I find it easier to remember what I said in 1948 than in 1998, and
that post had been cleanly wiped from my memory. Odd, possibly, but not an
uncommon fellow-passenger in the merciless march of
time.
A.Bouazza
wrote:
It is of course
preposterous to claim that FitzGerald is superior to Khayyam, one's preference
is purely subjective and depends on what one is looking for
….
I don’t know if A.Bouazza was
referring to the remark made by my Iranian student in 1964, that FitzGerald was
“better” than Khayyam, but he was young and probably did not appreciate that
“good, better and best” are completely useless comparatives when it comes to
evaluating art of any sort. What is the purpose of art, and by what yardstick is
its excellence to be measured? It is of course extremely valuable to have an
informed and judicious opinion from someone who has a fluent mastery of both
Persian and English: my student’s English was not exactly fluent, and my Persian
hovers between rudimentary and non-existent, although I did pick up a soupçon in
my two years in
There are other measurements besides
“good/better/best”, however. Just for fun, I put Omar Khayyam into abebooks’
keyword, and the site came up with over 8300 items. I can’t help surmising that
but for FitzGerald there would have been less than 100. This seems to demonstrate something, but
it is less easy to say exactly what. I amused myself with preparing a primitive
bibliography of Khayyam references, as a supplement to my present collection of
approximately 25 editions of the Rubaiyat
(apologies for being incapable of supplying a definitive transliteration) in various languages, and would be happy
to forward it to anyone interested. FitzGerald converted his material into a
shaped poem, starting with dawn and ending with night, which is quite alien to
the 1000 or so scattered quatrains which are very loosely ascribed to Khayyam
(En effet, la
tradition attribue plus de 1000
quatrains à Khayyam -
Wikipedia).
Charles