Comments on Quatrain 1 et al.

The viewer will find the works cited below in the sidebar under Bibliography.

Dashti groups Quatrain 1  along with  6 other quatrains  in his  final selection of  75 quatrains which he attributes to Khayyam, under the title, جهان هستی ؟/The World of Existence?  Sadeq Hedayat groups this quatrain (10) with nine others under the category, راز آفرينش/The Mystery of Creation.   Ahmad Saidi also groups this quatrain under 'The Mystery of Creation.'  The visitor will discover, however, that many of the quatrains  do not fit into a simple category.  Complexity attests to the brilliance of these attributed-to-Khayyam quatrains.

There are  two further comments I wish to make about this quatrain.  First, it appears that Edward FitzGerald did not make use of it,  and the third line in my layout (or the 1st misra' of the second bayt), speaks to what I feel is often an urgency, even despair, which is often found in these quatrains:  "No  one  fairly and squarely address what is the only important issue in this debate..."  The speaker likely believes that no one can solve the riddle but the despair as I see it comes from the failure of an attempt to untangle the mystery.  This rhetorical question in the final line of the quatrain is a statement of despair.   Elwell-Sutton translated the last two lines less forcefully:  "Will no one ever tell us truthfully/Whence we have come, and whither do we go?"

This quatrain (Quatrain 1) is one of the first 16 of the 36  "key" quatrains which Ali Dashti selects because he believes the 36 were likely written by Khayyam.   The first 16 of the 36 are attributed to Khayyam in   sources nearer in time to Khayyam's life  and they reflect for Dashti views consonant with this astronomer and mathematician.   Language and conventions expressed in these quatrains  are  appropriate as well,  but in the end for Dasthi and others who claim authenticity in the  quatrains they attribute  to Khayyam, the  choice depends on  the  preference of the selector.

Here is an opinion  about "authenticity" in general and a useful guide to the problem of the proliferation of quatrains attributed to Khayyam:

        Therefore I suggest that we focus on the "Khayyamian school of thought" rather than Khayyam the person, thereby making the question of who was the real Khayyam as well as the authenticity of his poems somewhat irrelevant to the message of this school of thought attributed to Khayyam...The fact that there are hundreds of quatrains which have been attributed to Khayyam throughout the centuries, in my view, is not a liability but an asset. (The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam, Mehdi Aminrazavi, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2005, 14, 16).

َMehdi Aminrazavi (p. 16 of his Wine of Wisdom) has, however, accepted as authentic the 178 quatrains in the work of Mohammad  'Ali Furughi and Qasim Ghani.   Parichehr Kasra bases her translation and commentary on Forughi-Ghani's 178 quatrains and has printed all 178 of them.    Sadeq Hedayat ascribes 143 quatrains (he considers 35 of them doubtful) to Khayyam.  Hedayat's "choices" are favored by  Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs  in their translation: The Ruba'iyyat of Omar Khayyam,  Penguin, 1981, where ( p.30)  Peter Avery states that Hedayat's selections are "the more convincing to anybody concerned with literature rather than with whether or not Khayyam composed all or some of the poems" (here "more convincing" in this respect than the selections of Forughi and Qasim Ghani).