Quatrain 19

چون عمر بسر رسد چه بغداد و چه بلخ

پیمانه چو پر شود چه شیرین و چه تلخ

می نوش که بعد از من و تو ماه بسی

از سلخ به غرّه آید از غرّه به سلخ
source, Dashti 48, p. 252

chon omr besar rasad che baghdaad o che balkh
paymaane cho por shavad che shirin o che talkh
may nush ke ba'd az man o to maah-e basi
az salkh be ghorre aayad az ghorre be salkh

Forughi and Ghani, quatrain 53, and others have this 'inversion':

چون عمر بسر رسد چه شیرین و چه تلخ

پیمانه چو پر شود چه بغداد و چه بلخ

chon omr besar rasad che shirin o che talkh
paymaane cho por shavad che baghdaad o che balkh

When life reaches the end, what  matters the sweet and the bitter
When the Cup is full, what is Baghdad and what is Balkh …

And sour or sweet, why fuss since life shall fly,
At Balkh or Baghdad – why care where we die?
Drink wine, for silv'ry Moon will keep its beat
From full to new long after you and I.
Saidi, quatrain 10 

Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon ,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one .
FitzGerald, Stanza 8, 5^th ed.

 FitzGeraldiana:
Arberry (Romance, 116) and Heron-Allen (see quatrain viii, p. 18-19) claim that FitzGerald was influenced by Nicolas (below) in choosing Naishápúr:

                  چون میگذرد عمرچه شیرین و چه تلخ

             چون جان بلب آمد چه نشاپوُر و چه بلخ

chon migozarad omr che shirin o che talkh
chon jaan belab aamad che neshaapur o che balkh

Nicolas, quatrain 105

When a lifetime is past, what's the sweet and the bitter

When life mumbles away, what's Nishapur and Balkh

 

And in this mold was Whinfield, who also has نشاپور:

When life is spent, what's Balkh or Nishapore?
What sweet or bitter, when the cup runs o'er?
Come drink! full many a moon will wax and wane
In time to come, when we are here no more.
Whinfield, quatrain 134

Heron-Allen also refers us to Nicolas, quatrain 18, lines 3  & 4, and says that Nicolas in this quatrain had a direct influence on FitzGerald line 3. He translates:
Whether our Sākī holds the neck of the bottle in his hand,
Or the soul of wine oozes over the rim of the cup.

FitzGerald's  line 4, according to Heron-Allen, comes from the Calcutta MS, one of FitzGerald's two sources (lines 3 and 4 translated by him):
At the moment when I flee from destiny,
And fall like the leaf of the vine, from the branch.

Arberry tells us in The Romance of the Rubaiyat,  that FitzGerald used Latin as the language for his first translations of Khayyam.   Arberry calls it 'lazy Latin', p. 58, which likely means that FitzGerald did not bother to consult the classical masters of Latin verse for inspiration [although he had to have been familiar with Latin prosody].   Here (p.59) is FitzGerald's Latin quatrain (my translation below it): 

Sive Babylonem, sive Bagdad apud, Vita ruit,
Sive suavi, sive Vino Poculum mordaci fluit:
Bibe, bibe: nam sub Terra posthâc non bibendum erit:
Sine Vino, sine Sáki, semper dormiendum erit.

Be it Babylon or Baghdad , so Life goes,
And the Cup with Wine sweet or biting flows.
Drink up – in the Ground there's no time for bibbling,
Sans Wine, Sans Server, it's perpetual sleeping.

Translation and some more discussion of the quatrain: 1.  When life comes to the head/the end, what [is] Baghdad and what [is]Balkh? ....When I first read this line and until recently, I have always thought of it as "whether in Baghdad or in Balkh.'  Because of the conjunction, va/o, which occurs in the following line as well) I ask myself if  'what' is better-- 'what does it matter, Baghdad, Balkh or (Nishapur)... take your pick'.     Saidi has notes on Baghdad and Balkh, the importance of these two cities, gems of the west and the east (p.238-39).  Nishapur may have found its way into later MSS, since it is the city of Khayyam's birth and death and where he spent most of his life.  I don't believe Khayyam was ever in Baghdad, but he was in Balkh according to Nizami (of Samarqand), where one evening Khayyam regaled Nizami and others with the prediction that flower-blossoms would twice yearly  shower his grave at Nishapur (see E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia, 2. 246-47)  2. When the cup is full, what [is]sweet, what [is] bitter?...  As above, what does it now matter if it was a sweet of a bitter life  3.  Drink wine, since after me and after you [there will be] many moons  [there will be many phases of the moon] 4.  They will come/stretch from the waning moon to the new moon, from the new moon to the waning moon...both salkh and ghorre are derived from Arabic.  Salkh literally is the stripped-down month -- the moon is 'gone' and ghorre is the splendor of the new moon.  Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon on ghorre: "the night, of the month, in which the new moon is first seen ... (likened) to the ghorre (blaze) on the forehead of a horse"

Comments

[Site Owner]

Administrator's apologies to ZT who posted this comment on September 4,2010 (which I have inadvertently deleted and cannot seem to retrieve but printed and give below):

"Congratulations on a very nice site.
I'm interested to know what you think of this book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=eNYLAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
This seems to use a different Persian manuscript which I can't completely link up with the one you have used. Is the Dashti source that you have used available anywhere online? (Forgive my ignorance - I'm new to this)."

[Site Owner]

ZT, I have been using "Edward FitzGerald’s Rubâ’iyât of Omar Khayyâm with their Original Persian Sources," Bernard Quaritch, London ,1899 in which Edward Heron-Allen doesn't follow the Bodleian MS layout as he does in the work you have cited which is a translation, facsimile, text and notes of the 158 quatrains in this MS. Unfortunately I don't have access to my copy and will not for a while so I cannot look into this further or try to collate for you. Perhaps you can find my source online.
I thank you for again making me aware of this 1898 'Bodleian edition' of Heron-Allen.

I don't believe the Dashti is available online.

Thank you for your kind comments. I am also fairly new at this myself and have left it alone the last year or so for Hafez.

[N Shaddick]

This is a tremendous site, a fanus, a beacon, a light: and this your commentary on q19 sheds light on the joke Arberry himself makes at www.jstor.org/stable/609104 - which I picked up at the time but of course not the detail you supply. Thanks and congratulations.

[Site Owner]

Thank you for your gracious comments. I'll have to look at the jstor! All good wishes and I regret slowness in response.