Friday, April 6, 2012

Omar Khayyam/Edward FitzGerald - The Rubaiyat

"I don't like poetry.
I particularly don't like rhyming poetry."


"The reason for the low rating: if ever there was a poet who was writing out of clinical depression, Khayyam would fit the bill. Most of these poems are about the futility of life, the lack of satisfaction from the carnal life of the moment, the lack of hope in the future. Reading them all in a sitting is like having coffee with Eyeore."


"I think that I just generally have difficulty enjoying 19th-century translations. I can tell that there is some beautiful stuff going on in here, but for me it is overshadowed by the flowery language of an English gentleman."


"Each quatrain is stuck at the top of the page in 'boring' Font ... Not a single illustration.
Words fail me to describe how poor this book is."


"Don't Waste Your Time With This Mush!
Don't waste your time with this trite collection of vapid, paganistic, intellectually lazy and self-indulgent quatrains ... What we have here is an unrepentant pagan being translated by a 19th Century neo-pagan, and the result is an incomprehensible, senseless mush. The writer and translator appear unwilling, or rather incapable, of plombing the depths of the questions raised here, rather opting for the trite, tired, vapid and unsatisfying answers of antiquity - -and this not out of any deep reflection, but rather as the result of intellectual laziness and epicurean self-indulgence. Make no mistake -- this is lightweight drivel."


"I really don't think I got an awful lot out of this book."


"Uh.

I'm not sure what I read, but I'm fairly sure I didn't like it.

Was Khayyam talking about becoming an alcoholic when he said he went and got married to wine?

I don't even know anymore."


"Something could have been lost in translation here."

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