Handout 1 193
Week 3 ( Oct, 8 and 10)
Comparative Literature through the Imperial perspective and the Post- Colonial
Approaches :Edward Fitzgerald’s ‘low opinion’ of Oriental Literature-
translator of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam ,a classic poem, Cultural Colonialism as
Shakespeare was imported to the Arab World or India, among Others and Chinua Achebe’s view of
Comparative Literature in the Post- Colonial Era as a ‘ synonym for the narrow,
self-serving parochialism of Europe’.
Chinua Achebe’s
Africa
has been the most insulted continent in the world.
Africans' very claim to humanity has been questioned at
various times, their persons abused, their intelligence
insulted. These things have happened in the past and have
gone on happening today. We have a duty to bring them
to an end.... And "we" includes writers. (MY 138 Morning Yet on Creation Day)
‘As an essayist Achebe has gained fame with his collections MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY (1975), HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS (1988) and his long essay THE TROUBLE WITH NIGERIA (1983). In 'An Image of Africa' (1975) Achebe criticizes Conrad's racism in Heart of Darkness. He has defended the use of the English language in the production of African fiction, insisting that the African novelist has an obligation to educate, and has attacked European critics who have failed to understand African literature on its own terms. Achebe has defined himself as a cultural nationalist with a revolutionary mission "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement." But Achebe has not stopped criticizing postcolonial African leaders who have pillaged economies. During the military dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha he left Nigeria several times. When the 70th birthday of the patriarch of the modern African novel was celebrated at Bard College, on November 2000, Wole Soyinka said: "Achebe never hesitates to lay blame for the woes of the African continent squarely where it belongs."’
(http: //www.kirjasto.sci.fi/achebe.htm) Selected works
Edward Fitzgerald
( 1809 - 1883 )
The 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyám,
is well known in the West, through the work of the English poet and translator
Edward Fitzgerald.
Published in 1859, Fitzgerald's "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám"
attracted little attention until 1860, when it was discovered by other artists
and literary figures, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti
who was a poet, and is well-known as one of the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
Fitzgerald was a talented poet; however, his "Rubáiyát" is not a serious and scholarly translation
of Khayyám's work, and represents many of his own
ideas and line of thought. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers
and poets quite often used Oriental works for inspiration.
The original verses from which Fitzgerald drew his
inspiration, are a collection of isolated and separate "quatrains",
which resemble the Japanese haiku in function, if not in form. The quatrain,
"robái" is a very popular form in Persian
poetry, and nearly every Persian poet has written some. This is the only form
of poetry attributed to Khayyám, whose fame in his
own time was through his influential works as a mathematician and astronomer.
Indeed, he was only twenty-four when he wrote his most important work, a
pioneering treatise on algebra.
Fitzgerald's "Rubáiyát"
describes what he believed to be the thoughts and feelings of Omar Khayyám, with seemingly Eastern tones and colours, but in a way that would be appealing to a Western
audience.
The "Rubáiyát's"
tendency to rebel against the restricting Puritanism of the Victorian era,
captured the imagination of many freethinkers of the time, yet it was only
universally appreciated, after Fitzgerald's death.
Today, Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyám has been translated into many
languages world-wide, and can be regarded as a masterpiece in its own right.
Most importantly, Fitzgerald helped to create in the West, a real interest in
Persian literature as a whole. Of the 107 stanzas
in the poem (fifth edition), the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
(2nd edition) quotes no less than 43 entire stanzas in full, in addition
to many individual lines and couplets.
The most familiar stanza is
surely:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise
enow!
However, the work is now held to be more reflective of Fitzgerald than of Khayyam, whose collected works have been corrupted by
forgeries added over the centuries. It is necessary to seek out one of the
scholarly editions of Khayyam; see Ali Dashti's In Search of Omar Khayyam
for a good discussion of the problem. No women feature in Fitzgerald's Rubáiyat and "it is most probable that FitzGerald envisaged “the thou
beside me” to accompany him in the wilderness as being a young male."[1]
Lines and phrases from the poem have been used as the titles of many
literary works (Nevil Shute's The Chequer
Board; James Michener's The Fires of Spring; Agatha
Christie's The Moving Finger; Eugene
O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness—slightly misquoted). Allusions to it abound
in the short stories of O. Henry. Saki's nom-de-plume is a reference to it. In 1925, when Billy Rose
and Al Dubin
wrote the popular song A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich, and You, (* see
below) they surely expected listeners to catch the reference to the famous
quatrain quoted above. http://www.geocities.com/elmbsm193/fitzgerald2
*A Cup Of
Coffee, A Sandwich And You
Melody
- Joseph Meyer, 1925; Seq. by Don Ferguson
Billy Rose, Al Dubin, 1925
In the movie plays of now-a-days,
A romance always must begin in June,
Tales in magazines have all their scenes
Of love laid in a garden 'neath the moon.
But I don't miss, that kind of bliss
What I want is this,
Chorus:
A cup of coffee, a sandwich and you,
A cozy corner, a table for two,
A chance to whisper and cuddle and coo
With lots of huggin' and kissin'
in view.
I don't need music, lobster or wine,
Whenever your eyes look into mine.
The things I long for are simple and few;
A cup of coffee, a sandwich and you!
http://musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/cupofcof.htm