DOCTORAL THESIS

Ruby: A Contemporary Re-interpretation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Ahanchian, Michael Zand

Award date:
2014

Awarding institution:
University of Roehampton

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 Ruby: A Contemporary Re-interpretation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

by

Michael Zand Ahanchian MA (Cantab), MRes

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD

Department of English and Creative Writing

University of Roehampton
Abstract

This study is a practice-based creative writing project with an accompanying thesis. It

consists of Ruby, a work of poetry and prose, along with a thesis that seeks to

contextualise it within literary poetics. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the creative

point of origin of Ruby. It is not a translation of The Rubaiyat in the traditional sense

but rather a re-interpretation of the earlier text. Whilst Ruby heavily references The

Rubaiyat in terms of content and narrative structure, it is an original piece of work set

in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ruby is strongly influenced by

contemporary British and American poetry, and the references for the poem have

partly been shifted to modern-day Britain. I have included a range of recognisable

forms of “conventional” poetry, including quatrains, sonnets and haiku. However,

there is also creative re-working and development using a variety of more

experimental methods, through original poetic compositions, the use of “found

material” (i.e. texts and images from other sources carefully placed for poetic effect)

and via word montage. The result is a hybrid piece of work, which incorporates a

variety of textual and visual forms. The thesis is divided into four chapters: the first is

an introduction to the nature and aims of Ruby, and an overview of how it fits with

other current research activity in the field of “poetic translation.” The second chapter

explicates the format and structure of the creative piece, particularly its visual layout.

The third chapter contains the text itself and a detailed critical commentary, which

explores specific allusions in the text and how they connect the work to broader

literary themes. The final chapter is a conclusion, exploring the implications of the

poetics of Ruby to the subsequent treatment of re-interpretative translations of this

kind.
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One: Something Old, Something New .............................................................. 2

Chapter Two: This is “What It Is” ................................................................................ 24

Chapter Three: “Ruby” ................................................................................................. 27

Chapter Four: Forging Omar Khayyam ..................................................................... 182

Ruby vs. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – Table of Comparison ........................... 190

Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 193

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Peter Jaeger and Jeff Hilson, my

research supervisors, for their patient guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and useful

critiques of this research work. I would also like to thank Dr. Mark Knight, for his

invaluable advice and assistance during the early days of the project.

My grateful thanks also extends to the rest of the Department of English and

Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton, in particular Professor Laura Peters,

Professor Jenny Hartley, Professor Martin Priestman and Ariel Kahn. I would like to

offer my special thanks to Jenny Watt and Sarah Solly – their willingness to give their

time and resources so generously has been very much appreciated.

I wish to thank all the poets and writers who have made such an important

contribution to the creative development of Ruby, none more so than Marcus Slease, but

also Dr. Tim Atkins, Harry Gilonis, Alex Davies, Chris Gutkind, James Harvey and the

Writers’ Collective at The Camden Creative Colony. I would also like to thank Paul

Davies for his generous support and encouragement during the latter stages of the

project.

Finally, a very special thank you goes to my family for their support and

encouragement throughout my study, especially to my wife Carolyn – without her

patience and love, none of this extraordinary adventure into the world of Omar

Khayyam would have been possible.

1
Chapter One:

Something Old, Something New

Persian poetry has suffered badly from those who are determined to

find an arbitrary mysticism in everything … you would think there

was nothing else than nightingales which are not birds, roses which

are not flowers, and pretty boys who are God in disguise. (Bunting,

in Pound 5)

Ruby is a contemporary reinterpretation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is a

series of poems originally written in Persian and attributed to the poet and

mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048–1131). A reinterpretation of a Middle Eastern

text of this kind produces at least two distinct but inter-connected challenges. The first

is to create a poetic re-working of the original that avoids the Orientalist cultural

stereotypes often associated with Middle Eastern literature.i The second is to produce a

new piece of work that is relevant to contemporary British culture and is integrated

within a framework of contemporary poetics. Underlying both these challenges is the

assertion that a re-interpretation of The Rubaiyat should do more than simply attempt to

accurately translate its original representational ‘meanings’.ii Instead, the aim is to

create a new piece of work connecting with a field of activity which Tim Atkins

describes in The Seven Types of Translation (2011), as “translation as it is understood

and practised by poets – poetic translation” (2). Poetic translation, according to Atkins,

is the practice of using source texts as a springboard from which to write. In other

words, this is a poetic process that is more concerned with the creativity of the

translated piece than with preserving the authenticity of the original. Poetic translation

2
often uses foreign texts as sources for inspiration in the creation of new work, with

varying degrees of fidelity of form or content to the original text.

These two inter-linked challenges, to reflect Middle Eastern culture whilst

integrating with contemporary British and North American Poetics, require a delicate

interplay between “the old” and “the new.” The old is represented by the original text,

in this case The Rubaiyat, which is the inevitable starting point of this research, whilst

the new is my contemporary response to it. Both of these challenges require a

sophisticated treatment of the old, avoiding cultural clichés but providing a recognisable

historical and literary context. Yet both also demand originality in the new – they

require a creative act that Kent Johnson describes in his essay “Prosody and the

Outside” as “an imaginative transformation of the original” (25).

In his preface to Omar Pound’s Arabic and Persian Poems (1970), Basil

Bunting laments what he believes to be the poor state of Persian poetry in translation.

Whilst he acknowledges the linguistic faithfulness of many translations of Persian verse,

he is frustrated by the inability of these texts to reflect the cultural richness embedded in

the original works. Too frequently, for instance, there is an over-emphasis on mystical

allusions or naturalistic imagery. There is often, Bunting argues, no reflection of the

subtleties and ambiguities of the original Persian works. These issues are compounded

by an over-reliance on exotic or archaic language, which assigns the texts to being of

historical interest rather than contemporary relevance. He contends that the workings of

translation itself are at the heart of this predicament. Translation, in the conventional

sense of the word, is usually based on the premise that an accurate transference of

representational meaning is a primary purpose. Bunting, however, highlights that in the

process of seeking accuracy in representational meaning, key aspects of Persian poetry

3
are being lost. He cites Hafez, for instance, whose work depends almost entirely on

sound devices, literary references and contemporaneous cultural contexts – none of

which are reflected in English translations. Bunting also gives the example of

Manuchehri, who applies a variety of motifs and conceits in his poetry that are

deliberately ambiguous and laced with multiple meanings. Translations of Manuchehri,

Bunting contends, often focus on a single perspective (such as a specific school of

Islamic philosophy) rather than highlighting the ambiguities of the language, therefore

missing its more complex or nuanced philosophical positions (3).

In Omar Pound’s Arabic and Persian Poems, Bunting finds a different approach,

and one that is potentially a productive template for an alternative approach to the

translation of Middle Eastern texts. For instance, in his translation of the twelfth-century

Persian poet Anvari’s “The Poet Politely Refuses,” Pound explicitly avoids exotic

depictions of the East:

Even gods would resent that paradise

a cottage with thrushes in the loft

and senior civil servants beg me back

to dine at Claridges

and view the dogs at Crufts (51).

With “The Poet Politely Refuses” Pound asserts the contemporary relevance of twelfth-

century Persian literature by connecting it with twentieth-century English cultural

references and poetics, and as a result creates something new and distinctive –

something which transcends both traditions. In this respect, Pound takes a fundamental

cue from the poetics of Charles Olson, and specifically his manifesto of writing,

Projective Verse (1950). Amongst other things, the essay posits “a poem is energy

4
transferred from where the poet got it … by way of the poem itself to, all the way, the

reader” (1). Olson argues that through an animated application of the poetic line – a

precise enactment of speech and the rhythms of breath - emerging forms of verse will be

made to move, to become dramatic, lively, and filled with energy. He conceives the

poem as a field of high energy (channeled through the poet into the written work

received by readers) that must be in a constant state of movement and dynamic tension.

Pound redeploys this notion of “energy” in Arabic and Persian Poems to the poetics of

translation, where the enactments of speech and the rhythms of breath reflect both the

original and new languages. The words and registers that emerge are filled with the

dynamism of the interaction between the two languages, and this is much more

important to Pound than achieving a high accuracy in representational meaning. In other

words translation as it is practised in Arabic and Persian Poems is energy transferred

rather than the conveyance of heavily proscriptive meaning from an original text.

In his introduction to Pound’s translations, Bunting actively encourages the

creation of new texts that are crafted from older texts but which also deliberately seek to

go beyond them. Bunting argues that responses of this kind would reveal the complexity

and intricacy of earlier poetry, in a way that “conventional” translation, with its

emphasis on representational fidelity, could not. He believes these new texts would

search out parallels and juxtapositions between cultures, and working within a variety of

contemporary literary forms, would enrich the literary landscape. Something old is

given a fresh perspective and relevance by the production of something new, whilst

something new is linked to a cultural framework that responds and is enriched by

something old. Thus, as Pound himself argues in his preface to Arabic and Persian

Poems, there is a “re-appraisal and re-discovery” of the older text (5), from which

5
something new emerges. It is through this process of “re-appraisal and re-discovery”

that I came to create Ruby.

Bunting’s critique of the state of Persian poetry translation makes one important

exception: the re-interpretation by Edward FitzGerald of The Rubaiyat of Omar

Khayyam (1858). Bunting acknowledges that FitzGerald’s treatment of The Rubaiyat, a

series of “rub’i” or quatrains originally written in Persian during the eleventh and

twelfth centuries, has been the only serious attempt to take Middle Eastern poetry

beyond representational approaches. No creative re-appraisal of The Rubaiyat can

ignore the contribution made by FitzGerald, whose translation is so intertwined with the

original work that it is often playfully referred to as “The Rubaiyat Of FitzOmer”

(Razavi 45). It was FitzGerald who first popularised The Rubaiyat in the West, and who

produced the first widely available translation. Significantly, this version was not a

straight copy of Khayyam’s work into English, but a creative re-working, starting with

the original but overlaying FitzGerald’s own poetic devices and imagery. Indeed,

FitzGerald’s literary skills flourished with the emancipatory power he experienced when

working with a foreign-language text. For FitzGerald, it was more important to produce

a persuasive and stimulating creative piece than to closely replicate the meaning of the

original. In a letter to his friend Edward Cowell in 1859, FitzGerald stresses that “at all

Cost, a [translation] must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one cannot

retain the Original’s better. Better to be a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle” (33).

At the heart of FitzGerald’s work is a belief that in order to reflect the key

themes of the original, the translation would need to move away from a literal

transference of words and phrases. FitzGerald consistently adapts the vocabulary of the

original, and introduces his own imagery. Many of the verses are paraphrased, and some

6
of them cannot be confidently traced to any one of the Khayyam quatrains at all. In his

letter to Cowell, FitzGerald himself refers to his version of The Rubaiyat as a

“transmogrification” (34). He stresses that his translation would be of interest “for its

form, and also in many respects in its detail: but very unliteral as it is, many quatrains

are mashed together: and something is lost … of Omar's simplicity, which is so much a

virtue in him” (35). However FitzGerald also believes that this lack of fidelity offers

him room to create afresh, and to re-engage with the original text in an altogether new

way. As Charles Norton puts it in a review of The Rubaiyat in 1869, “FitzGerald’s

translation is a work of poetry inspired by a poet, not a copy but a re-delivery of poetic

inspiration for his own time” (577).

As with FitzGerald’s rendering, Ruby is a creative re-interpretation of The

Rubaiyat that is in many ways a departure from the original. This is not a “straight

translation” in any meaningful sense. In other words, fidelity to the original is not a

primary objective. It is rather a re-invention of Khayyam’s work, and it is new poetry

in its own right. It is also not a re-writing of FitzGerald’s work. Whilst FitzGerald has

undoubtedly made a serious contribution to the field of poetic translation, with Ruby the

process of “re-appraisal and re-discovery” continues. It connects with a contemporary

cultural framework and applies new poetic forms that follow the conventions of neither

Khayyam nor indeed FitzGerald. Ruby challenges attitudes to poetry in translation by

reflecting and engaging with contemporary poetics. Whilst it is necessarily a re-

invention of The Rubaiyat, it is also firmly grounded in contemporary poetry. A number

of twentieth and twenty-first century writers have revisited foreign-language texts as a

means of advancing poetic innovation, including Omar Pound himself with his Arabic

and Persian Poems. Amongst contemporary writers, a broader quest for re-

7
interpretation can be found for instance in the work of Caroline Bergvall. In “Via”, first

published and performed in 1998, Bergvall collects 48 translations of the opening tercet

of Dante’s Inferno, and arranges them into a sequence based on a musical structure

devised by her composer-collaborator Ciarán Maher. A common thread running

between both “Via” and Ruby is this desire to “stand in” the original text, to ingest it

and re-live it as part of contemporary poetics. Genevieve Kaplan, in her review of “Via”

in Jacket magazine, argues that its narrator is not circling the rings of hell; instead he is

trapped between the motives of self and world, learning the repercussions of sleep and

inattention: “suffering the knowledge that ultimately one’s self is responsible for one’s

predicament, Bergvall’s speaker finds that blaming the world will get him nowhere”

(20). In common with “Via”, Ruby involves a process of assimilation and self-

assignment based on the reconfiguring of an original older piece of poetry into

something distinctly new and personally relevant. This is apparent in the very first

section of Ruby:

omar is

woken is

re broke n

for the un of it

fitz and spits

all iranned out (8).

Indeed whilst the first full page of Ruby is a re-working of the first quatrain

(“awake…”) as it appears in FitzGerald’s translation (1), it is a deliberately subversive

one. In stark contrast to the FitzGerald version, the language here is fragmented and its

meanings are difficult to decipher. Also the birth motif in the FitzGerald quatrain is

8
laced with new images of fear and death, in order to highlight Khayyam’s complex and

fatalistic attitude to reaching middle age. Critically, the Ruby version re-centres the

stanza on the reader: the “you” is the “broken un of it” or in other words the unresolved

heart of the poetic narrative (5). As with “Via”, Ruby prompts us to re-engage with the

original text by becoming the subject of the poem. Both works thus highlight ways of

acknowledging the influence of translation through models of ingestion, or assimilation,

by our total absorption in the material. In this respect, it is possible to come to an

understanding of the poetry by standing in it, by becoming part of it.

Throughout Ruby there is also a deliberate and considered process of de-

familiarisation and re-orientation. The point of origin is something old and Oriental – a

series of Persian quatrains that have become known as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

These quatrains have been translated many times into English, most famously by

FitzGerald, but never dramatically re-located to a Western setting. Ruby aims to re-

discover Persian literature by populating it with Western poetic traditions, using a range

of creative forms and poetic devices. Ruby places The Rubaiyat into settings that reflect

the Persian contexts within which it was written, and then re-places these original

contexts with Western, specifically British locations and cultural phenomena. The

overall result is a re-orientation of the Orient, creating new and intimate connections

between the older Persian and newer Western worlds which are embodied within the

work through a process of disjunction. Disjunction, as it is used here, refers to a sense of

dislocation, fragmentation and dysfunctionality. It also suggests a desire for

reconnection, but in new and unexpected ways. This disjunction permeates the design

and structure of Ruby, with a strange frameworking around sounds, an inconclusive and

abstract narrative, and with a multi-directional perspective on place and time. It also

9
informs the styles, language, and speech registers that are used in the work.

Conventional punctuation is largely abandoned. Words and phrases are broken and left

unfixed, or joined to neighbouring words in unnatural ways. Overall, the aim is to create

a disruptive mood: making the known “rub up”, often uncomfortably, against the

unknown. The agenda of this disjunction is to subvert stereotypes of Persian poetry; a

rejection of mellifluously rhythmic styles and of sentimental or archaic language.iii By

undermining any complacencies or pre-conceptions of the language and form of The

Rubaiyat, Ruby offers the possibility of with a new kind of orientation.

Underlying this formal procedural disjunction, there is also a deliberate and

implicit cultural re-orientation in Ruby. The cultural context in which The Rubaiyat is

often presented in academic and literary circles relates to a long-lost, or even imaginary

Persia of Epicurean excess and exotic mysticism. As well as being a gross over-

simplification of the philosophical positions of The Rubaiyat, these Orientalist

associations seek to distance archaic Persia from modern-day Iran. The alluring

romanticism of this imagined Khayyamian world is, by implication, detached from and

perhaps even unachievable in the modern-day Middle East. As Edward Said points out

in Orientalism, imaginary pasts such as this make a dialogue between cultures “fraught

with difficulty” (78). The Orientalist cultural narrative presents the archaic Persian

world as irrelevant and defunct, no more than a historical curiosity. However, by

setting my text in the present, there is an opportunity to re-connect The Rubaiyat to a

contemporary world that includes both Britain and Iran, and to reflect my own cultural

orientation, as a Briton of Iranian extraction. There is dialogue in Ruby between the two

cultural traditions, particularly through the heterogeneous exchange of words and

speech registers that facilitate a shared framework of linguistic understanding. There is

10
also an exchange of ideas – connections are made between Western and Eastern

mysticism, and there are competing and conversing voices representing, for instance,

Islamism, Zionism, Marxism and Western Christianity.

In presenting multiple and often contradictory voices, Ruby offers alternatives to

mainstream Orientalist interpretations of The Rubaiyat. In the notes to a conference held

at the University of Cambridge on The Rubaiyat in 2009, published as part of the 2013

volume Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Popularity and Neglect, the word “Iran” is largely

absent. Across the entire document, which lists the papers presented in the conference

and their abstracts, “Iran” is only mentioned three times, and on two occasions in

relation to an academic institution. Amin Razavi argues that the absence of Iran in The

Rubaiyat is a deliberate political act by Western translators and publishers, a means of

separating the benign and unthreatening beauty of Orientalist readings of Classical

Persia from the perceived ugliness of a Modern Iran, with its associations with

extremism and terrorism (216). Yet as Ali Behdad highlights in Orientalism after

Orientalism (1994), an opportunity for dialogue is missed when such a one-dimensional

approach is taken. Indeed dialogues such as those found in Ruby provide the potential to

confront the “sense of historicism that develops around the mainstream, where the

dominant tradition learns from and then discards other forms, in an inevitable growth in

power through time” (122).

The disjunctive and experimental nature of Ruby reflects this rejection of

mainstream preconceptions of Iranian culture by addressing aspects that are rarely

associated with The Rubaiyat, such as the importance of mainstream Islamic thought on

attitudes to mystical Persian poetry in modern-day Iran and the impact of migration to

the West. In Disjunctive Poetics (1992), Peter Quartermain examines a number of

11
experimental writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream. Quartermain

suggests that part of the reason for the explosion of experimental writing in America is

linked to the political, social, and economic dislocation of non-English speaking

immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them, found themselves uprooted

from their traditions and disassociated from their culture. The line of poetry that runs

from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language

poets, Quartermain contends, is not constructive but deconstructive because it

emphasises the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness

and openness of the creative process. Yet as Richard Gilbert argues in his essay “The

Disjunctive Dragonfly” (2003) many non-English speaking immigrants challenge the

mainstream not just by applying a disjunctive practice to their “original” culture, but

also to their “new” one (7). By bringing together marginalised culture and language in

both societies, a new opportunity for dialogue is created. In this respect, Ruby is a re-

assertion of the Iranian-ness of The Rubaiyat, whilst at the same time asserting the

Western-ness of Ruby itself, through my use of poetic forms that are heavily influenced

by Olson, Bunting, Omar Pound and other twentieth century British and American

poets.iv

From the very beginning of Ruby, the objective is to create, address and

challenge preconceptions about Persian poetry. For instance, the alternative title of the

poem, The Wine and Wisdom of Old Omar Khayyam (2014 UK Tour), is a playful take

on the Orientalist presentation of The Rubaiyat in the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. In such readings, the poet-narrator is a Persian sage, an iconic image of the

Middle Eastern mysticism. The title symbolises the pervasive cultural influence of this

stereotype, an ever-present reference point for Western views of Middle Eastern culture,

12
which in the case of The Rubaiyat was largely introduced by FitzGerald. The

intoxicated wise man is himself a manufactured hybrid, a synergy between the cultural

iconography of the British poet and the Persian poet-philosopher. Ruby transplants

cultures, at one point taking Omar Khayyam away from the wine taverns of twelfth-

century Persia and inviting him to the private clubs of nineteenth-century Britain. I add

to this mix of iconographies by introducing “2014 UK Tour” in parentheses – a pastiche

of contemporary pop culture and a light-hearted reference to my contemporarisation and

relocation of The Rubaiyat in modern-day Britain. As with FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, I am

“revisiting” Omar, applying my own interpretations, and placing him in a new setting

that is in equal parts familiar and strange.

Ruby is structured around four frameworks of re-orientation which I have

designed in order to provide a variety of means of navigation through the work. The

first re-orientation involves the form of Ruby, which is significantly different in

structure to the original Rubaiyat. Whilst Khayyam’s original contained quatrains

assembled in sequence (the order of which varies by edition), Ruby is a series of pages

of text, with each page containing four distinct pieces. The pages are assembled in a

narrative sequence and there are four sequences, or “parts” overall. Whilst The Rubaiyat

generally uses a single voice (the voice of an imagined Khayyam), Ruby contains

multiple voices, some of which address the reader directly whilst others address

Khayyam. Each voice has a specific tone and purpose in the narrative but nonetheless

they all have a connection with The Rubaiyat. Some of these voices are incarnations of

Khayyam himself whilst others act as a response to certain elements of The Rubaiyat.

Towards the end of the first part, for instance, Khayyam is presented as a companion

along a poetic journey: “pathways through it . you will be with / now and in the embers”

13
(44). The various voices also communicate with one another, either within a single page

or across pages, creating a multiplicity of dialogues.

The second framework of re-orientation involves the sounds of Ruby, offering a

reassuring if slightly dispossessing sense that there is something of value to discover

from the tones and music of words, even if they are foreign or not fully understood.

Voiceless phonemes are sometimes separated from their corresponding voiced ones, to

new and perhaps unexpected associations. In other words, words are “re broke n” or “un

furl e d” in order to reach “the un of it” (34). The velar fricativev is initially absent, as is

largely the case in Modern English, but as the narrative progresses it begins to re-assert

itself and highlights a connecting point, or more specifically a connecting sound,

between Middle Persian and Modern English. Gradually the sounds and rhythms of

Persian are introduced into the English text until ultimately at the end of Ruby, the two

languages are in communion with one another: “rub’i” becomes “ruby” (106), and “i

am” becomes “xay am” (121). The overall effect is the reassembly of component sounds

in new ways that embody natural breathing patterns. In this respect, Ruby takes a lead

from the poetics of Charles Olson’s Projective Verse – specifically, Olson’s proposal

that poetry should reflect the rhythms of natural breath and thought. Olson works

through the ear, and his lines are breath-conditioned. The two halves, he says, are: “the

HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH,

to the LINE” (2). In the case of Ruby, I redeploy Olson’s notion of natural breath to

inform my translation poetics: the rhythms and sounds of Persian are juxtaposed and re-

connected with those of English. I call this the projective transfer of verse between

cultures, or “projective transverse”, a concept which I review in more depth in Chapter

4.

14
 The third re-orientation revolves around the multiple and ambiguous meanings

of the diction of Ruby. Early on in part one, for example, there is expression of

locational and definitional ambiguity:

para lulls

re broke n

for the un of it

meny meanings

fitz and spits

to new irans (34).

This extract highlights the breakdown of singular meanings (“the broken un of it”)

whilst at the same time pointing to the possibility of new more ambiguous connections

(“to new irans”). There is a repetition of symbols and motifs throughout Ruby which

form a unifying framework, but which also constantly seek to undermine any attempt to

establish a single meaning. For instance, the layers of place and time may at first seem

ordered, stratified. However, variations in the portrayal of place and time seek to disrupt

the formation of any consistent sub-text. Indeed, the parallels are merely “para lulls”,

fleeting moments of harmony in what is otherwise a far more complex narrative. Many

of the sections in Part Three of Ruby (“Time and Revolutions”) contrast the dislocation

provided by the prose with the transformative nature of the poetry. These prose passages

are open to multiple meanings and are culturally inclusive but they still contain seeds

that connect the narrative to something lived and specific. A sense of emotional

breakdown and recovery is central to this linguistic breakdown and realignment, which

recurs throughout Ruby.

15
 The fourth re-orientation is the specific language of Ruby, which includes words,

phrases and at times entire passages that are borrowed or stolen from other languages.

The interplay of these words with recognisable English is a key means of offering

connections with other cultures, particularly with those of the Middle East. In fact it

represents an on-going dialogue between different linguistic traditions, particularly

Persian but also Hebrew and Arabic. With the stanza “our hands did this” nearing the

end of Part Three, for example, through the repetition of Persian words as fragments, a

starting point is created which weaves meaning and non-meaning in both languages:

our hands did this

distanced . on

dast daad . on

doost haa as a dozd

the star is dozded

as daast on dust (91).

In this stanza I introduce the Persian words “dast daad” (hand gave) and connect it

phonically with “hand did” and “distanced.” “Doost haa” means “friends” but is itself a

false friend to “the star” as well as sounding similar to dozd, which means “thief.”

“Dozded” is a meshing of the Persian word for “thief” with the verbalisation of a noun

in English by adding an “-ed.” There are similar acts of fragmentation and

defamiliarisation throughout Ruby. Foreign words and phrases are increasingly used and

are designed to decontextualise Ruby by shifting it away from the original meanings of

The Rubaiyat. Translations are never provided and are not needed: lack of intelligibility

makes us all outsiders in the hinterland of Ruby. We are defamiliarised from the words

and phrases, we are all forced to reconnect the sounds in new and divergent ways.

16
Sometimes these words are used in a meaningful way (intelligible to native speakers)

whilst at other times the phrases are “meaningless” in the conventional sense. Yet most

of the time they are pulled out of their original contexts or are used in ways that might

puzzle speakers of the original language. Non-speakers of that language are thus at no

disadvantage in this climate of multilingualism: we are all foreigners learning from one

another’s vocabularies, speech registers and literary styles. Around these foreign

fragments, the English language also breaks down, adding to the disruption and

disarray. At times, foreign language texts have been sewn directly into the narrative,

without any English references at all. But these languages do not operate in isolation:

they interact and respond to one another throughout Ruby. It might be useful to imagine

the interaction of these languages as the physical interplay of celestial bodies. Using this

analogy, the languages are being drawn to one another and are spinning around each

other’s words, achieving a temporary symbiotic balance. The result of this process is a

new kind of comprehension that draws upon the lexicons of two languages because it

does not seek to actively translate one into the other.

It is place itself, rather than language or symbolism, which is most transformed

by Ruby. It is useful to imagine that a dialogue between cultures takes place in a specific

landscape. This landscape is not the urban conurbation or “metropolis” that might at

first seem to be the obvious point of contact. The metropolis of Ruby is full of migrants

willing to share their words and speech registers. The landscape of Ruby offers an

alternative to the standard language of the metropolis. This other place is on the edge, a

hinterland, far enough away from the city streets to offer breathing space. This

landscape, a hybrid imagining of England and the Middle East, cross-fertilises one

literary tradition with another. It offers a space where alien words and registers meet

17
and spin round one another in a kind of literary dance. It creates a vital communication

line, a narrative thread that, whilst being disruptive and subversive at times, allows

language to be freely voiced, absorbed and adapted. It is through this hinterland that we

are able to travel between one culture and another and one time and another. We

connect with these free voices away from the bright lights of the metropolis, away from

the fixed rules of language convention. It is here that we are able to encourage one

literary tradition to have a dialogue with another and to promote cultural responses.

One important influence on the poetics of Ruby is Allen Fisher’s Place (2005).

A book-length poem written as a series of five sequences, Place takes as its focus the

landscapes of South London, where Fisher was living at the time of composition. It is a

series of interconnecting poems and prose passages that juxtapose the geographies of

this landscape with mythology, linguistics, psychology, mathematics and conceptual art.

Fisher strikes through the layers of history from a single point of view, but then

extrapolates it out to a variety of landscapes. As Peter Barry highlights in “Allen Fisher

and ‘content-specific’ poetry” (1993), Fisher’s “abiding concern is what Eric Mottram

calls a ‘locationary action’, the subject’s attempts to ‘place’ himself, within a specific

locale, within his culture, and within the historical and political juncture we inhabit with

him …” (56). Ruby applies much the same method of “locationary action” but swaps the

urban and suburban landscapes of Place with environs on the margins of the city. These

are natural points of beauty and calm that Khayyam uses to take shelter, take stock and

reflect on this place in the world: “illuminations/ carved in/ natural and ro/ s/ e/ s” (53).

As with Place, this passage illustrates my attempt to “carve” through the layers of

history from a single point of view. However, whilst Fisher’s roads are rivers that flow

into a Thames that is a mature and dominant feature of the metropolis, the rivers of

18
Ruby are the highways and railways that skirt the hinterland – fragile, under-inhabited

and easily traversed.

The objective of the methods used in Ruby is to produce poetry and prose that,

whilst at times referring to the original Rubaiyat, is fundamentally new. Critically the

aim is to re-locate this new work within the sphere of contemporary writing and to

apply models of translation poetics that go beyond conceptions of fidelity. Khayyam is

thus not simply re-interpreted, he is resuscitated and reborn in contemporary Britain.

Early in Ruby, he opens his eyes to find himself in twenty-first century Britain, as

though reborn into a new world, in a scene reminiscent of an illegal immigrant who has

successfully crossed the border (34). Whilst language is broken down, it is also re-

assembled in such a way that promotes cultural dialogue and encourages language to

adapt and evolve. Meanings are assigned and revised, words can be created and

destroyed, even sounds can have their own stories to tell, but language remains relevant

to cultural discourse. In The Dialogic Imagination (1981), Mikhail Bakhtin argues that

language and literature are living organisms that respond to texts and that meanings

occur in an active dialogue with texts. To Bakhtin, all forms of writing have the

capability to evolve and change cultural forms using these dialogical means.vi They are

not static phenomena; instead they mutate and metamorphose over time and space:

No living word relates to an object in a singular way: between the word

and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an

elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same

theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate. It

is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific

19
 environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic

shape. (21)

By “re-living” the poetry of Omar Khayyam in Ruby, we subsequently revitalise

our own linguistic tradition. I have created a contemporary response to The Rubaiyat, in

order to re-invigorate it, to breathe life into it, but also to encourage a dialogue between

the English and Persian literary worlds. With Ruby, I am insisting that poetry can be a

powerful, if not exemplary, mode of discourse for this form of cultural engagement.

Existing away from the metropolis, in a cultural hinterland, Ruby connects us with other

languages, places and times. vii Ruby offers the possibility of variety and ambiguity in

meaning. It promotes a dialogue that informs and is itself informed by the polyphonic

world from which it has evolved.

NOTES

i
As Edward Said argues in Orientalism, literary expressions of the Middle East

are often almost entirely constructed in the West (124). This is particularly true of The

Rubaiyat, which was virtually unknown in the Middle East prior to the first popular

translation of the text into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1858. FitzGerald’s

emphasis on Epicureanism in his re-interpretation of the original was not evident in any

previous translation and commentary on the work. Yet by the mid twentieth-century,

20
much Persian scholarship focussed on Khayyam’s perceived Epicureanism. See Razavi

for further discussion on this point (212-216).

ii
Ruby is a departure from the aims of many earlier translations of Persian

poetry and from the conventional theories of translation in which they are rooted.

Mainstream threads of translation studies, as discussed for example in Susan Bassnett’s

Translation Studies (1980) or Eugene Nida’s Contexts in Translating (2001) have

limited relevance to this project. In particular, Ruby is not a reflection of

“communication theory” as Bassnett or Nida would understand it, with its stress on the

importance of “reliable” translation as a form of interlingual communication. Instead, an

alternative poetics is proposed, with an emphasis on a dialogical approach to

understanding (see my discussion on Bakhtin, note vi). Meanings are forever evolving

based on a constant dialogue between distinct but inter-related voices. These meanings

are fluid and reflect the cultural contexts of the languages into which they are translated.

Indeed, as Steve McCaffery of the Toronto Research Group put it in Rational

Geomancy (1992) stepping away from the preoccupation with fidelity is itself a creative

act: “If we no longer consider translation as being necessarily an information service –

then it becomes a creative endeavour in its own right” (32).

iii
As Razavi points out, the Persian language is particularly musically repetitive

in its poetic registers. However this propensity for musical repetition is distracting and

should not be over-emphasised, as within it there are often subtle variations, such as

variable pauses, which allude to quite distinct emotional effects. By breaking up these

rhythmic patterns, these variations in poetic technique become more apparent. See The

Wine of Wisdom for a more detailed explanation of these techniques (92-93).

21
 iv
I am influenced by and constantly refer to a wide range of twentieth and

twenty-first century British and American poets in Ruby. My commentary in Chapter

Three (130-171) includes specific references to these poets and poetry movements, for

instance see note 19 where I discuss The British Poetry Revival and its aftermath (138).
v
The velar fricative is usually represented by “x” in Ruby, which is its symbol in

the International Phonetic Alphabet. See Handbook of the International Phonetic

Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (1999).

vi
A great deal has been written concerning Bakhtin's attitudes to poetry. There is

no denying that in his early writing, Bakhtin saw poetry as a monological medium,

unable to offer a polyphonic expression of the world, and thus rather reactionary or at

least relegated to the world of the discursive. However I would argue Bakhtin's theories

are central to the development of a poetics of poetry. As Michael Eskin points out in his

essay “Bakhtin on Poetry” in Poetics Today (2000), in his later years Bakhtin began to

re-evaluate his perceptions of poetry (21). Eskin’s analysis was based on readings of

“The Problem of Speech Genres” (1952-53) and “The Problem of the Text” (1959-61),

both published in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986). Eskin argues that

Bakhtin began to conceive of a role for verse as a plausibly construed dialogical world.

Indeed Eskin stresses that some poetry is highly effective as a dialogically and socio-

politically exemplary mode of discourse. He cites Bakhtin’s analysis of Pushkin’s

Eugene Onegin as poetry “which exemplifies the elusiveness of generic boundaries and

the subversion of authorial intentionality through an engaged dialogue” (386).

vii
It is important to note that the polyphony that takes place in the Hinterland is

not the same as what Bakhtin called “heteroglossia.” In his essay “From the Prehistory

of Novelistic Discourse” in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin defines heteroglossia as

22
the inherent diversity of unofficial forms of a particular national language – similar in

nature to dialect. Bakhtin contrasts heteroglossia with “polyglossia,” which is the

interaction of two or more national languages within a given culture, such as took place

in the Hellenistic world. This does not preclude a dialogical process taking place in an

extra-literary sense in the Hinterland – it just does not strictly speaking manifest itself as

heteroglossia. The true heteroglossia will appear when the literary influences are

presented in the work of the writer when he returns to the metropolis.

23
Chapter Two:

This is “What It Is”

Ruby begins with the words “this is what it is” but what is it? The short answer is that

my poem consists of a sequence of texts that are contemporary interpretations of The

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There are a total of 104 pages of poetry and prose in Ruby,

each of which is loosely based on one of the original rubais or quatrains written in

Persian by Omar Khayyam in the eleventh century. However the poems in Ruby are not

traditional rubais: each page generally consists of four stanzas written in free verse and

is designed to reflect a range of contemporary poetic forms. One of these stanzas is

always in the form of a quatrain, which in some way relates to a rubai from existing

Persian manuscripts of The Rubaiyat – see the Appendix for a table of comparison

(184). To the left of the four stanzas, many of the pages also contain epigrammatic

prose passages, which link the poetry to a number of theoretical discourses. The overall

narrative, whilst broken and deliberately opaque, at times alludes to an imagined

journey by Omar Khayyam through modern-day Britain.

Chapter Three consists of what it is: the full text of Ruby, along with an

extensive commentary. The primary objective of my commentary is to provide

explanatory notes and related discussions that elucidate and explicate various aspects of

Ruby, both in terms of the contexts in which it is written and the implications of the

writing. The contexts that I discuss include the reference points and responses in the text

to existing poetry, both European and Middle Eastern, and broader contemporary

cultural and political realities that have shaped the work, such as the image of post-

revolutionary Iran in the West. In addition to these issues, my commentary reviews the

24
poetic and poetic–translation practices used in Ruby and where they are located in terms

of broader debates on poetic practice and creative writing theory. My commentary is

modular in form, reviewing the poems by using a series of endnotes. Each note

highlights one or two key elements that I believe have significance to the research as a

whole. This kind of modular format to critical analysis has been applied by numerous

writers through the centuries, from The Discourses of Epictetus through to Thomas

More’s Utopia and Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card (1987). The modular approach of

Ruby has specific parallels with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1999) – a

collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the nineteenth century (most of which

are found texts) – and which, like my commentary, contains ‘fragments’which are

disparate in content but which align to an overall poetic project. My aim is not,

however, to use this modularity to chronicle things, as Benjamin does, but to unpack

them. I am using the modular format to get into more detail about specific “text bytes”

or lines, sections and images from the poetry and then unravel their significance to

broader discussions on contemporary poetics, particularly the contemporary poetics of

translation. The heterogeneous character of my commentary mirrors the heterogeneous

nature of the poem itself, but neither text pre-supposes an over-arching master narrative

to unify the poem and/or commentary. Another proponent of modularity in criticism is

David Shields, who in Reality Hunger: a Manifesto (2010), presents a collage of

unattributed quotes by luminous thinkers and writers about “our obsession with ‘the

real’ in art, literature and culture” (12). Yet as in Robert Sheppard’s Far Language:

Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry (1999), the modular approach taken in this

chapter seeks to “go beyond explanatory description of individual pieces, but rather to

extrapolate broader conclusions and potential implications for creative writing practice

25
as a whole” (43). Sheppard points out that these expositions are “a way of allowing

creative writing to dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or

reflection” (49). In other words, in this chapter I use critical expositions of the language

and form of individual texts from Ruby at the micro level, to initiate a dialogue with and

to challenge the poetics of Ruby as a whole – at the macro level. During the course of

my commentary these micropoetics continuously engage with and evolve the

macropoetics of Ruby, which elucidate some of the implications and extrapolations that

I discuss in Chapter Four.

26
Chapter Three:

“Ruby”

27
MICHAEL ZAND

Ruby1

28
Ruby
The Wine and Wisdom of Old Omar Khayyam (2014 UK Tour)

A poetic composition in five parts:

The Garden

Ashik

Time and Revolutions

Of Zarathustra

Water Falls

29
this is what it is:

30
eyes . open . alba

awake
midway in the journey of our life
cheered by the tumbrils
by the evergreens…

31
Part One:

The Garden.

32
the garden
of words is on the soft edge, of many new old stories2

33
 1.

awake . midway in the journey of our life4

cheered by the tumbrils . by the evergreens
I write . I don’t know why
but like the notation of stars . it stays

If there is such a thing as a language of truth,

no special tongues are needed here 5
the tensionless and even silent depository
you will not be sea sick6
of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for,
then this language of truth is—the true language.3
omar words
para lulls
re broke n
for the un of it
meny meanings
fitz and spits
new irans now 7

like a tin can

un furl e d

we come with wine music and four or five broken stories 8

34
2.

my fingers did this9

we begin creations with constraints

by light we hands out peace
we recast . voices are unasked . songs
are the swoop of it . the beginning the10

we find him . in candle light

together . there are better words11
naked bodies . to finger tips
inside and outside
writing . moving
having writ
move on

een england e doshmani nist

een england e zendegi boodan ast12

35
 3.

when I was younger in the west . the west

was a different . this

my wheel is a whirlwind . it leaves a dust

there are no great books
If the task of the translator is viewed in this light, the
our language is open . intense . impenetrable
roads toward a solution seem to be all the more
obscure and impenetrable.13 via the rain . on puddles and stones14

and
out of it
is it
yes
it in a
is

don’t wallow in it though . cadge yourself a drop of booze 15

36
4.

when i was younger in the east . the east

was safe . was turquoise16

we are all in it . complex and riddled

there are no minor notes
but beneath . is the un of it . a whole history
transcends any golden age

and
in it
is an
other
word
for a

i’m a poet . not a state-sponsored sooth sailor17

37
 5.

this is language it is
is rose gardened
It is as if the kinship of languages manifests itself in
found18 in a
translations .
a slow
slow
grow

words are evergreens

if the heart discovered them . these meanings

they would know our geographies
but all frets are the same . like candlewax
young kids hurry past . freshed-eyed

the beginning end of things . we talk . alwaysless

38
 6.

but in a mode
in the mode of glory19
bunting and cobbing and
Translation is a mode.
of the light . in the vaults
songs not of stone . but of light

time adds to it

neither you nor I know all the stories

posterity hustles them
yet cups of tea brew themselves
in kitchens we smile and exchange words

and out of the hard ground rose a mud like fishglue 20

39
7.

through history
what else goes
a roun and a
the policy of time21

a thick frost . like pearls fractured

radiant icy mildew . nothing pierces it
sentences still remain . remain unfinished
like water . working on rock22

as though the earth could grow

the more you see . the more you think . the less23

40
 8.

through history
moment by
This is the meeting of two texts — of the ready- the space
made and the reactive text being created — and to stretch to
consequently, the meeting of two subjects and two you . the
authors.24
unbroken un of it

the hands of the wise . translate this or that

what they called the mountains
thirty or fifty years from now . crafted
by the saw blade . dust spinning

back to the geography of it . the land on the left25

seagulls swoop across the windscreen as my mobile rings 26

41
 9.

through history
what it means
to forge peace
in the assarts
the streets
It is the task of the translator, for the sake of the
many pavements
liberation of pure language. to break through the
decayed barriers of his own language.27 psychogeographies . they enriches us28

cycles . inscriptions of the material of things

prayers end . in revolution and rebirth
which is why there are so many ideograms
let them settle . on the moon night wall

everything that happens is

in nishapoor the tables are longer . the tables are thinner 29

42
 10.

ever greens die too . some times

the roses dominate . in their special shirts

perfect . in perfect soil
Our work, with its rudiments in language, is midway
but in the late afternoon red
between poetry and doctrine. Its products are less
spook lights dance on the water . like lilies
sharply defined, but it leaves no less of a mark on
history.
vacant in the mid
in worst of thoughts
race for the saints
some time soon
itle break . up
discovering our
life before . the
bird . bird 30

for us to
make it
better

the driver’s taking me . he always says it’s a holy city 31

43
 11.

true . there are seven sisters and a bad bull 33

but there are many other animals
look hard for them brother . with night wine
in the garden . un hurried
The event of the life of the text, that is, its aura,
always develops on the boundary between two of the life . what of it . what else goes
consciousnesses, two subjects.32
in this lovely morning light like
pathways through it . you will be with
now and in the embers
evergreens die too . sometimes

from town to form . from place to34

crumble soil around . with a new
as the east and west chatter
reminding and redeeming
mashing layers of time . on time

the decades . the rubies

44
Part Two:

Ashik. 35

45
ashik
takes roads through fields that carry sea-glow, yellow

46
 12.

now . is really our time too . youth

salaam means wisdom and life . wine too37
toasting me happy . riding the city roofs
The question “what is a relevant translation?” would
a train of lichen . dog days and flutes
return the question “what is translation?” or “what
should a translation be?”36
an old radio
or a radio gram
a crackling afghan woman
i was so
young . my first
memories
were of a tent spread38

I am from London but London is not my city39

these clichés
are weapons of mass poetics40
are allegories of a one thousand and one and eleven and a

47
 13.

it would seem so

if I could control the world . I would have

We are all mediators, translators, transmitters. In
but once in it . in its plurals and tenses
philosophy, as in all domains, you have to navigate
in its hand band sky eye
an implicit cultural exchange, relays between
cultural places and times.41 nothing could be better . than its runnings

a higher viewpoint
in the human race is that
he may be born
fixed once and
for all . but
dogmas
differ

he steps onto the street . sees a white cloud

48
14.

which is why I speak for

ashik ashik . I am the edges brother . breathe through me 42

warping and weaving . spheres and spears

what you see is what you get
the alignment of arabia
a trail of ash . a smokeless burn

for the ancients

prayers
hymns
processions
whispers
bells

nomadic . in between . ghostings 43

49
 15.

multiplicities

the pity of it . tired eyes and hands

injured by blades . the ink dry
a calendar with a date ringed in red
At the word go we are within the multiplicity of the pity of it . the way we
languages and the impurity of the limit. This makes
it impossible to decide the source language to which,
he steps onto the street . sees a white cloud ahead of him
for example, the word "relevante" answers [relève], a
there will be a storm no doubt
word that I leave within quotation marks for now.44

properly speaking
a lofty truth
in itself
pers45
for
a

50
16.

in transit . free of cartographies46

we hold on . gripping our wine tight

somewhere between the sea and the birds
water colours blot . waves and music
are an explanation of colours47

soon he is lost . but he keeps his eyes on the cloud . happy

to make his way through the narrow streets and alleys

Nima smiles
straddles us
between us
in his middlezone
in his boats48

51
 17.

I believe

We only ever speak one language – and, since it

returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always the narrow road is everywhere 50
for the other, from the other, kept by the other,
etching . while the rest of us steal a boart
coming from the other, remaining with the other,
a drip drip trip . like a hornwort
and returning to the other.49
spellbound by its foibles . and our travails

he sees other men as he walks . travelling like him . with

but we’re still bounderied

what he comes from
is words to
make us
new

52
18.

don’t worry about the baroque

the cloud . as he walks towards it . seems to dissipate

there are many questions many answers

all of us get to the two blue doors . .

sub voicives shouting atatatat at them
in . then . out
like an oxy gin release . a peace51

interpretations of life
illuminations
carved on
strange
new
ro
s
e
s

53
19.

an egg on the end of a thread52

it separates . drifts apart into thousands of fragments

tumbling in the fall . life goes on

red charcoal burns
absinthe . disruptive . it burns in a drum
a free heart a . a waft of air

the folly of these men

their language
their gait
their
style
is
a

54
 20.

if only I were a

it is a cloud of flies which lifts and breaks . sweeping

Whilst we share words by relay, there are a very

great number of them — it is an uncontrollable time changes . a pen trajectory . changes
exchange of dogma and difference.
a business of cloudroll . striving
tip toes . from the doost i once was
to pomegranates and the opposite of eyes

as the strata of the earth

preserves us
exxhange
us in
wor
d
s
s
s

55
 21.

if only I were . better

he went into the street again . he was walking quickly but to

One should never pass over in silence the question of
the tongue in which the question of the tongue is
we have all the time . as petals sweep past
raised and into which discourse on translation is
our lyric resists . re generates53
translated.
like a long straight track against fingertips
kites flying . reshaping possibility

the heat in us
the zest
to follow through
follow through style
follow
tranformations
of day

56
 22.

if only I were a . a

We often forget, in this same familiarity, how the upward into the indifferent sky . sweeping him up too

unity or identity, the independence of the word

remains a mysterious thing, precarious, not quite
some time soon
natural, that is to say historical, institutional, and
itle make . up
conventional.54
new words
new woods
because of bird . bird
because it translated itself too55

under stand ing the uni verse . the one

a pilgrim age is
a torrent . in this gust of a
wither . where there . w . be with a

57
23.

a.a.a

up ward into the indifferent . the best of all of us is a

four elements and seven planets56

an deep . an delightful
or maybe a slightly broken paving slab
is the universe . if it came

the taste of
language
in the mouth
chalk
salt
clay
ay

58
 24.

an colours an

Subjectivity is not meant to replace an authentic or the heart whispers . azure and black
single-voiced expression – rather to illuminate the turned . will turn . the many will watch
hierarchical relationship that many readers to and so and . so . a door opens
poetry express. shifts and overlaps . instances to live

i am the ashik . the forger . the new

justly gardened
just roses
by land
sea
re
nw
ed
it

59
 25.

there are many names . stories57

but patterns are threadbare . they mark us
the good and the bad . in the rice husks
sift through them . as the wheel turns
Translation then becomes necessary and impossible,
s
like the effect of a struggle for the appropriation of
names.
we are all naked and breathing it

petals across our l

petals a
p e t
a l
s

gv . gv l v. l v v 58

60
Part Three:

Time and Revolutions.

61
time and revolutions
divide us, hiding the many isolated fires that warm us

62
 26.

we uncover the earth60

Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent

a book of words . with a tear drop blot
on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden
beneath the woman? Is it the individual, furnished
the jet stream blew it . whithered it

with a philosophy of the Woman? Is it universal yet on a mountain skin . a field opens
wisdom?59 wide open flowers . from the

field . flowers . scythes . smiles . stories61

grey gold
a cloud
implies
still
ness
lang gauges . ex changes . ages

63
27.

symbols scrawled on the walls

our sages are exhausted . grieve statues

at the foot . broken . doom hearted
there are other worlds . times . revolving
dark red . veiled . blue at the centre

anything about anything . dance without moving . water

water holds
erect the long
strong
stems
of
lily buds

64
28.

under an orange tree . recline there

when we are children . we learn

for a time
flowers grow . through cracks in the earth
until dusk . dust . as the wind carries us62

art
is a step
away or to
from them them
all the meanings of them63

there are so many of us climbing to see how

to un break it it

65
 29.

I believe

our friends have . gone

each one and an other . gone
laughing at the sun . at the wine . gone
For him, for us too, it is language that speaks, not time slips . to the sound of
the author. 64

a piercing note running across our skin . reminds us of

we gather at the days end and days

our reparations
renewal
for
the
hills
the hills

66
30.

statues in a field . ruins

the kind and queen of the caravan

no justice . a long way from gypsy priests
meet me again at that time . in the hollow
find me gold and silver in the river bed

increasing rain
the old man
smiles and
grumbles
sweet
nothings at

shadows

67
 31.

shadows change

dawn . in its turning . aval ast

perhaps there are equal measures
To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to
but when it all goes up in smoke
reach that point where only language acts,
the ant and the wolf feed together
'performs', and not 'me'.

lyric . diminished
it is how we say the say
that’s the peach of it
diminished
better
better for it
much better
than an I or you65

fire works and bon fires . im pulse we can share

68
32.

listen
to where the breath sto
we fill it with shards
hardened . candied
an old jug is a

when I was grown . grown from home . he remembered me

water drops . oceans

dust or a speck . in the universe
to the place I must be at every layer of time
like a rude sport in an open field

we never saw one . the sea roses

every rose garden was just a rose garden . renewed66

69
 33.

there are so many moons

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be lovers pull together . by the shadows of the bonfire
disentangled, nothing deciphered.

hurry and through the madness

naked . nuanced . like a private carnival
be the tenderness . the hundred kisses
wine . rebirth67

the moon is a sow

is a sow of
grunts
smiles
bubbles
and
laughter rocks

70
34.

gardens thrive

every garden gardens . a world to itself

the jug . the lips of the bowl . the neck

hung in the frame . a long way from home
ask you say68 . in the hollow
like children peeling oranges at the

alive
with
the jug
it waters me
and the garden below
the garden below

71
 35.

we are words too

they speak their tongue and I listen . there is no magic here

A structure can be followed through this multiplicity
— 'run' like the thread of a stocking at every point
old fabrics . silks . they fool us
and at every level
we stand edge on . against a huge window
red robes of flesh
sharing a single wine cup . we smile

yerushaalem zendast69
chiragash zendast
zend ast
zend
as
s
t

72
36.

a light breeze

tonight its over . its time for coats

for bending branches . against congruence
against the lack of surprises or a
sudden passage of high cloud70

the old road

is gone . is
blocked
but . there
and is
straw
berries

even if men did this . when it . men . truly truly

then i . would . stretch . across to . make it better

73
 37.

of brilliant flies
they jostle together protractedly
teeming like sands
But there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is
to be ranged over, not pierced.
among the foliage
the world sucked joyfully
pierced with light

wine . among the foliage

arching the marvellous
those snarling monsters
the river murmurs . the lilies

and to grow in the corn

as snow does to a fire
lovely outstretched nowness
a little wild ray of

74
38.

so lustful was the land

can you dig it . now the knights have gone

walking in to the world

naked
one step at a time
battle scars . an archeology of words
phosphorus tape burns

walking in
to the world the
the next life
waiting
for roads
words . worlds . back
the remembering . ring

75
 39.

so dry beyond the dream

a spirit whispered . circled me

play weird and vaporous games in the air
Information and symbols... is that all? No, for I am expelled heavy similes . metonyms
still held by the image. I read, I receive a third
relax . your vision will come
meaning.71

look beyond the cutting edge

daast an . the stories . broken up
under the bull bullshit

alone . restless
fading
with what memories
such a man
grows
old
o

76
 40.

beneath the towers

so misty beside the rain

I don’t know what is signified; at least I am unable to
zounds life was hard
give it a name.
like poking mammoths in the twilight
but damn we’ll miss it
when it’s gone

beneath the towers . we sang once

our friends judged us . endured us
for fleeting moments there were smiles
centuries pass . fields grow now

beneath the towers

77
41.

crowds in the rain . numb

I dream of happy ghouls . in the rain

tighten up your wig . or
the invisible kings have gone72
so we gather wheels and whorls
for the fools and the ashiks

on the surface . by the river bank

inside . we are open eyed
no words are needed amongst friends
long gone or yet to come

we gather wheels and whorls

for the fools and the ashiks

78
42.

quite quiet beside the old man . the world

all red beside the spirits

we condemn electric people in the vapors
and their false flags of easy happy
are watchful . in case passions fly
jangling angry keys
until we tire of it

quite quiet beside our comrades

a long way home . with wounds and dreams
but his gypsy words remain with us
a friend with whom to pull down flags73

our symbols are never enough . they never really were

79
 43.

hunter . hunted

so misty
beside the
was hard
like a
Obtusus means that which is blunted, rounded in
but we will
form.
when it’s gone

the king in his palace . cup in hand

assesses a field of graves . as
in how so many places . asses are 74
hunted . hunter hunted

but we will
when it’s gone

80
 44.

the town walls are still

sailors learn
unsure alive
fading slowly
memories water
black harbours
many pasts
The obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes — it is a knowing why
meta language beyond symbols — a kind of
criticism. the town walls are still standing
we still love them . and our freedom
to open all the very low windows . we
carry on . in a flurry of the new75

curving up

81
45.

an unreliable map . but it works

the rocks were indeed

hidden by
leaves
and
turf

birds perch on a wire76 . where

they gossip . strangely tiny in the light
and grind diamonds out of hale stones
twittering . songs we understand 77

above us

82
 46.

in a sweet waft
of a non
story
his

This is the epitome of a counter-narrative;

is

disseminated, reversible, set in its own temporality –

an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and we dig in . like the souls that we are
yet “true” founded on words . on dusted tiles
layers of memory . the archaics
as a monument . an old kind . a replica

we are . there
for a brief

never

83
47.

there was once a leaf78

early in the morning . whispers are outed

out of sync . out of favour
the last day of reckoning . for you and me
is bending . standing astride of . life

with veins
strands
it danced
turned
as ore . lit up
of the sun

long shadows on the earth as if to say

84
48.

lost in broad daylight

morning . at to the bank of wood

roses and birds . undisguised . naked
their faces closes in . warm as pearls
a smile . an intangible repetition

the refugee
takes another road
across the
sentient webs of earth
to make fight
to make fire

not knowing why

85
 49.

clouds come

clouds . this sorry scheme of things

thirty birds confer . along constellations
young comrades . sweep away
blossoms and harvests . smoke and dust79

I thought of myself as one of those children who

prefer the picture to the text the stars rose early
huge
gibbous
warm
a loud of
the wind went out as

the cloud came

86
 50.

the washes

noctilucent sky sweeps80

norouz in a north land . the wheel slows now 81
tomorrow there will be dust
The text of pleasure is not necessarily the text that for wine . for the pleasure principle
recounts pleasure… but one that transcends it.

he said
it had been snowing
for months
faint and orange
even in the hot south
even for us

we simmer
we must move to live . brother

87
 51.

they come from us . the tulips

from our heads and shoulders . fighting
what they call the corridor of uncertainty
by its very nature . it stumps us

The pleasure of representation is not attached to its

objects, but to its uncertainty.82 they come from us
from when the world was new
from when it was impossible
when it was lilies
when it just was

they come from us . us

from the seeds we planted beneath the towers

they come from us . us

they come from us . us . the tulips

88
52.

wine . makes philosophers poetic too

they steal our clothes they
pass us the shiraz they they
share seafish . we call them seigneur

the cloud came . green

the moon rose early . a

huge
gibbous
warm
loud
paradox
the wind went out as it

the cloud came . green

89
53.

tomorrow you

wrap // in this heavy cloak of nil // knife

wildered . like a slanted jar . I realise
your name unifies the heart
the world is lifted into its place

what can make good of it all and all

these few pauses that are

we will make good of it . all and all

90
 54.

the cloud came . red

the wine is gone now . an act

like a gesture of fraternity . a fig
repetitions of folly
An old, a very old tradition: hedonism has been still beat . these are ours veins brother
repressed by nearly every philosophy.

our hands did this

distanced . on
dast daad . on
doost haa as a dozd
the star is dozded
as daast on dust83

parts . paradox. perpetua

91
 55.

faces

the wine jug persists. does no harm

Ultimately we find ourselves defended by the fill it . pass it . drink shiraz and chardonnay
marginal figures, by Sade, Fourier and most of all for pleasure and for place
Nietzsche. it becomes us

you made this

this calendar of time and place84
to where the breath sto
we fill it with shards
hardened . candied
an old jug is a
is a

92
there are many faces . this is why time and
revolutions

Part Four:

Of Zarathustra.

93
94
of zarathustra
or of the whole of life not just now and the
dusks

95
 56.

iti vuttakam86

The fall of our footsteps rings too hollow through watching the potter . threading
their streets. And just as at night, when they are in the master . feet and wings
bed and hear a man abroad long before sunrise, so footsteps outside . a thief trips
they ask themselves concerning us: where goes the
we . immersed in it . making it whole
thief? 85

immersed in it
all of it
when they found a
writing his better
in the light
light of the

meet me
together break . the loneliness of the east and the west

96
57.

when I was younger I used to

it was a different then it was much

this urn . love struck and clay sided

tangled around the world
the lyric is wrong . but with wine it eases
like the birds and the bears and the birds

and
out of it
is it it
baar . aan 87

it in a
is

where . when . wafted . weaved . we . the rain . it collects it

97
58.

when i was younger it was

tur . quoise

there are many stores and storage rooms

words and earthenware anthems
thousands . too many
asking questions . laughing and weeping

and
in it
is an
other
word
for a

it collects it

98
 59.

this is language is
over gardeneded
Wisdom makes us weary… nothing will come of it as dead headed
we choke on our reason.
88
in a mode
a slow
slow

finding a way through it . my words my game my rules

drunk on sacred wine89

the forest is full of us . brother
branches bend to vault us closer to God
I will always live here

sea gulls a cross

99
 60.

above us . above man

in the ways of water
and earth and
Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist hilson and jaeger
Etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr moving chairs . in the vaults
gethan, ihn zu überwinden?90

some time soon . good

enjoy the flute music

there are no super men along the tigris91
and even if there were . who cares
we’d just move our chairs a little closer

we break . many times . between places and times

100
 61.

through history
what else goes
you decide
a roun and a
a fragment of 93

Wahrlich, ein schmutziger Strom ist der Mensch. Man

muß schon ein Meer sein, um einen schmutzigen
Strom aufnehmen zu können, ohne unrein zu
as a boy I had a cup . aval va akhar
werden.92
in which from time to time I kept
memories of flowers and seeds and other
tokens of love

as though the earth grows slowly

the more . the more

101
62.

the cloud washes . is

tonight I’ll make something

of myself
for science or art or the common good
for you

he said
it had been
for many
even in the
even with the
even though

tomorrow the dust . dus

102
 63.

it would seem so

branches are hints of hope

fingers . dispersals
give it time brother and they will
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there speak it . in the night95
stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose
name is self. In your body he dwells; he is all our
a higher
bodies.94
in the human race
he may be
fixed
for all
dog
ma

I found myself seated in a baroque room . a uni verse

103
 64.

ashik . ashik

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the

Superman – a rope over an abyss.96 too much wine
but then so were you my friend
there are starfish and other sea wracks
stiffened by the sun . alive

for the
ashik
ashik
processions
a rope for
whispering home truths

men in fezzes wenches . we have hats too . place to play97

104
 65.

me . we

paradise . bathed in wine

We embark on a dangerous crossing, a dangerous we have often fought ourselves in a
wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous full moon
trembling and halting.
without sheep and sheepdogs . reckless

I look up from the street and window and I see an old man

prop . early speaking

a lofty truth
is itself
a pin
or a
pin

105
66.

temporals . streams

nobody knows . certainly not me

there’s only one cat
he just keeps moving around
watching for a storm . eyes wide eyed98

temporals . streams of light and music . colours

Nima smiles
straddles us
between us
in his middlezone
in his boats99

106
67.

ruby . leave

this sphere is hardly home

like a life without lines around a cup100
it’s a big bag of hope and fear
a spectacle . all too brief

travelling like him . the colours stream passed me

but I’m still

by each
it is a
after
eff
ec
t

107
 68.

mirror . behind me an old jew plays the piano

Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses –and
not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the
the cloud . in the navy sky
creator seeketh – those who crave new values on new
tables.
the dances . they started and I joined hands
watching the sky . blue in the afterglow
for the flower . for jamshid’s cup101
the dances . illuminations and streams

interpretations of life
illuminations
streams
if you
li
k

108
e

69.

an egg on the end of a thread

fear . it smashes apart into thousands of fragments

tumbling in the abyss . life goes on

red charcoal burns
absent . disruptive . it burns in a drum
a free heart a . a waft of air

the folly of all men

their language
their gait
their
style
is

109
a

70.

if only I were a

I will make company with creators, with harvesters, look through the mirror . I am an old man again
with rejoicers: I will show them the rainbow and the
rope.
time changes us . moves us
hands . fingers . pen
it is the trajectory of cloud roll
it harbours middlemen . dangermen102

as the strata of the earth

preserves us
exxhange
exx
ch
a

110
y

71.

levertov . rexroth . williams

the old man stops playing . he walks gingerly

we have the time we have . through it

white fields . the scent of camomile
a long strong chain through it
to a explosion of musical movement

the cold in us
wisdom
breeds thus
the
tranformations
of our day

111
72.

if only I were a . a

it is a cloud of flies which lifts and breaks

sweeping upward against the window
sweeping us up too

there was once a leaf

in to the world . a body of truth

angels have inventories too . brother
creatures . elements . spheres
one . all . whole

112
 73.

the clouds . colours

this moment . matters

I do not want patterns . they just mark
Sharing poetic words always lifts us higher—
the good and the bad . mark
specifically, to the realm of the clouds: upon these we
place our motley bastards.103
sift through them . as the wheel turns . alive

there was once a leaf . there was once a

with veins . strands

with each other . this leaf
de coeur
loved
x 104

113
 74.

hunter . hunted

the leaf
And who among us poets has not adulterated his danced
wine? Many a poisonous mixture has been contrived turned
in our cellars; much that is indescribable was
was . as ore
accomplished there.105
lit up
in and out
of the sun

the king in his palace . cup in hand

animals and the earth find him
in how many places . the refugee . ready
hunter hunted . hunted

it was once with us . a germanic constriction of the throat

114
when it’s gone . it will return as a

75.

the cup . conjoining to little words . worlds in

the leaf
it blotted the earth
as it skipped
There are so many things between heaven and
catching a drop or two
earth of which only the poets have dreamed.
skirting . in . this place
spits . and slits

the parts of the cup . conjoin

drunken heads are hands grasping
for music or windows
for the ether of revocables

it is me who writes it . meddles . some times 106

115
 76.

is a series of plastic chairs

in . this place
the leaf recoils
an unknown tree
an unknown
spits and slits
Alas, one thing is the thought, another thing is the
deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The
honest . worthy

wheel of causality rolls between them and over them. de coeur

metaphysical weeds . on a wire

strangely tiny in the light
they grind sensuous diamonds
trying to sing songs we understand

finally . i have this sense . that i am one with my skin 107

116
Part Five:

Water Falls.

117
water falls
triumph as the sky stamps its feet and raises its hat

118
 77.

the sweet
waft of
quince
begins
the cycle
lifts it109
These are the hypothetical primordial songs which
preceded the epic and a generic epic tradition, songs
we dig in . like the souls that we are
about contemporaries that directly echoed events
founded on words . on dusted tiles
that have just occurred.108
layers of memory . the archaics
as a monument . an old kind . a replica

we are . here . smiling

for a brief

green

119
 78.

pushkin was always enough110

early in the morning . soft words

in sync . in sleeplessness
the patches fall . for you and all of you
Such songs we do not know although we must
bending . standing astride of it . flat
presume they existed. We can only guess the nature
of these aëdonic songs or of the cantilenas.
with veins
strands
it danced
turned
as ore . lit up
of the sun

long shadows . my hands wrinkled . I am very old now

120
79.

lost in broad daylight

we shared our feasts

beasts and birds . drunken night lights
heads drop a little
a smile is an intangible repetition

with veins . strands

life threads
which touch us
make us feel
a little
more

not knowing why

121
 80.

green

the tulip grows tough

in spite of the kings and nightingales
Character itself does not grow, does not change, it is he thrives in the ultra violet
merely filled in by the events of life itself, imperfectly letting her rest her head on his
disclosed and fragmentary. 111

it blotted the earth

as it skipped
we . i am
xay am
xay
yy
y
y

122
the cloud came to see us there. green

81.

wine . as the philosophers turned poetically

to where their clothes were stolen
pass us the shiraz they said . make us
drink it up and . we will call you seignior

the cloud came . it was green

and at the end

the leaf
when it fell
there were new roots
from the stretch
the sky breaking the earth
as if to say I

the cloud came again and again . always green

123
 82.

so . as you know . it goes

a longer road
seize it . carve yourself a construct
While a poet’s words endure in his own language,
even the greatest translation is destined to become buy many shoes . or all the shoes

part of the growth of its own language and

eventually to be absorbed by its renewal. 112 from what it is . it is

may
may
a little
and often
from various countries

so with eight books . shoes . in a kinship with sohrab we 113

124
 83.

how autumn values spring

cockerels and the morning blue

there is something else there too . it
Images continue to grow and develop even after the
fizzes . like sky bubbles
moment of creation; they are creatively transformed
in different eras far distant from the day and hour like the world as an idea of you

of their original birth. 114

this
was
not
ever
the
edge
of
it

125
we have no where to go . and a life time to get
there

84.

shoulders are temples

time to seek forgiveness

our future acts . however flawed
are last nights wine and cigarettes
in the tenth century . there were no returns

a smell or
taste
of wind
in the
the
throat

126
these are our songs of insolence and
inexperience115

127
 85.

this is language is
y(our) sounds and spaces
y(ou) con(texts)
in pieces
or
Understanding. The dismemberment of
understanding into individual acts which in turn
merge inseparably into a unified process. 116 a thousand pearls in a cave

time to drink up . sweet and lowdown

like the wise fool or the kings fool
kais and jamshid have long gone
leaving us doorways . a palace of traceries117

we . the universe

128
 86.

waters emerge us
hulled by silt

There is neither a first nor a last word and there are in alignment
no limits. scattered
expanding
honest

soul brain . skin tips 118

it is morning again . it always was

smashing the pebbles
fighting the jazz of fame . of reputation
love fastens . time sees to the rest

poetry speaks too . with us119

129
 87.

carnivals end it
up in the clouds they sigh
Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have we are all people
its homecoming. no single special story
just you and wine and
our bodies120

deep in the rondure . in the azure

bring back your lips from the brink
and for the sake of art or adjectives
don’t be modern . be mountains

a gift . there are colours . and love . the world rolls on 121

the lute broke . so why fix it122

130
 88.

where shall we go
from here
as it washes us . x
Bringing distant things closer without indicating the
the noise of water . xx
intermediate links.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx123
the angels of the . x . of
esfand . xxxxx . bala band are
the nishapour blues
ink . life124

roses are our guiding lights

we make the birds and we are the birds
we have always had this gift
on our lips / like water / like the falls //

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx . the sound thins into melody125

water . falls &126

131
forged old and new . for ruby . for you

132
 A COMMENTARY ON RUBY

1 As well as being a contraction of The Rubaiyat, the title reasserts the

importance of form when interpreting Omar Khayyam. Ruby, like The Rubaiyat, is

derived from the Arabic word for four, (“rub”) and firmly fixes itself in “the poetry

of the four.” Traditionally the “rub” is associated with rubais, which are individual

vignettes in four line blocks, rhyming quatrains which stand as poems in their own

right, often with philosophical or mystical themes. The “rub” in Ruby is more

expansive: these are explorations in form that are variously assembled in four poetic

clusters but that rarely follow the formal rubai structure. In this sense, these poems

are in the spirit of “rub” but not the same, and thus they are adjectivised. Rather like

if something is akin to fish, it is described as fishy: similarly here this work is akin to

“rub,” so it is ruby.

2 The conceit of a garden, particularly a rose garden, is iconic in Persian

literature. Consider for instance, Sa’di’s Gulestan (“Rose Garden”) which is

described by Omar Ali Shah in his introduction to his translation of the poem as “one

of the greatest medieval Persian works, which is as relevant today as in its own time”

(2). Gulestan is a series of stories and poems collected by Sa’di in the thirteenth-

century that highlight a variety of aspects of the human condition. Ralph Waldo

Emerson provided the preface for Frances Gladwin's translation of Gulestan writing,

“Sa'di exhibits perpetual variety of situation and incident ... he finds room on his

narrow canvas for the extremes of lot, the play of motives, the rule of destiny, the

lessons of morals, and the portraits of great men” (2). Emerson also notes how

Gulestan is the original source for many stories since associated with other writers:

133
“he has furnished the originals of a multitude of tales and proverbs which are current

in our mouths, and attributed by us to more recent writers” (3). Ruby is a similar

mélange but the roses appear at the level of language rather than narrative, “a

garden/of words” which provides the basis for its own “many new old stories.”

3 From Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923). This

quotation highlights Benjamin’s assertion that a process of supplementation of

language is taking place through translation because of the difference between source

and target language. The innate infidelity of this process is the source of an

enrichment of the target language: foreign, untranslatable concepts and structures are

brought into a language and take part in the process of an ongoing complement of

languages with its climax in “the language of truth” (3).

4 The first poem in Ruby begins with an allusion partly to the opening lines of

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy– “Midway along the road of our life” (1), and

partly to the opening quatrain of FitzGerald’s first edition translation of The

Rubaiyat (1859): “Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night” (1). Ruby is, however,

a self-conscious challenge to both of these other two openings, for whilst it

references these texts as a helpful point of departure, the broken nature of my lines

hints at a fundamental disharmony in the narrative of Ruby.

5 This is partly a reference to the Arabic word for Persians, which is “al

ajam” or “the tongueless.” The term derives from the time of the Arab conquest of

Persia when the Persian language was banned and the speaking of Persian was

punished by lingual mutilation. The “no tongues are needed” reference also

highlights that Ruby is not a work that requires any special knowledge of Persian

language or culture – that it is open to all who can read it (in English).

134
 6 The poems of Ruby do not follow the prescribed classical rubai form. In

Persian verse the prescribed form is a four-line (or two-couplet) poem, with rhymes

at the middle and end of each line. In English poetry, the traditional approach is a

quatrain with an iambic rhythm, end-rhymed ABAB or ABCB. Ruby in contrast is

written in free verse with stanzas of varying lengths and with no fixed rhythm or

meter. Each page contains a quatrain (in bold) that is a broad translation of an

original Khayyam rubai, and hence provides a flavour of the original form and

content. This is why I have called the sequence Ruby rather than “Rubai” because

they are similar to rubais but not exactly the same. In The Development of the

Sonnet, Michael Spiller describes a prescribed form as “one whose duration and

shape are determined before the poet begins to write” (2), which by definition limits

the scope of poets to express themselves freely and without too much deference and

interference from the past. Contemporary rubai writing, as with sonnet writing, is

dogged, however, by poets who struggle to move away from the prescribed forms.

As Jeff Hilson puts it in his introduction to The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, “the

number of poets who continue to use iambic pentameter on a consistent basis is

alarming and after a while the persistent rhythm washing through their poems

induces a kind of nausea akin to sea-sickness” (14).

7 Iran did not exist as a geographical entity at the time of Omar Khayyam,

even though his work has been appropriated as part of Iran’s cultural heritage.

Indeed the Iranian state was only founded with the ascension of Shah Ismail in 1487,

many years after the end of what is commonly regarded as the golden age of Persian

poetry. See Michael Axworthy’s Iran: Empire of the Mind for further discussion of

the illusive nature of Iranian nationhood (21).

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 8 There is a distinct visual layout to Ruby. Each page consists of four poems

on the right hand side and often a single piece of prose on the left hand side. The

poetry always consists of one quatrain, typed in bold, which is a direct (if often

rather broad-brush) translation of an original rubai from Omar Khayyam. The other

three stanzas vary in length but are designed to connect with the quatrain in some

way, be it in terms of theme, style or language. In this respect, the complete

translation of the rubai should be seen as the entire page rather than simply the

quatrain, as the entire page relates to the original in some way. By arranging the

rubai in this way, I am challenging and responding to a narrow or prescriptive

approach to its form. Again I refer to The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, which is

similarly interested in challenging interpretations of a traditional form: “Critics often

talk of the sonnet’s unique and beautiful asymmetry – the traditional octave and

sestet of the Italian sonnet being just off kilter – but with too much ‘apt use’ this

fundamental instability at the form’s heart has become blithely accepted and the

form itself blandly ‘beautiful’ ” (Hilson 17).

9 This line alludes to verse 51 of Edward FitzGerald's translation of The

Rubaiyat: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on.” The poem in

turn, refers to Belshazzar's feast as related in the Book of Daniel: “In the same hour

came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the

plaster of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that

wrote” (5:5). The fingers here are mine, rather than Khayyam’s or even Edward

FitzGerald’s. By emphasising my authority over the text I am thus again highlighting

the lack of fidelity in my translations.

10 The last two lines of this stanza were created using a poetic constraint

technique derived from a method presented by Lescure in his essay “N+7” in Oulipo

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Compendium (1998), based on an N+7 movement. The N+7 constraint involves

replacing an original word with a new one that is 7 places along in a dictionary. The

original words were taken from the Whinfield translation of The Rubaiyat.

Constraints such as N+7 are a means of triggering ideas and inspiration through the

generation of series of words using mechanical methods, such as picking words out

of a dictionary at certain pre-determined intervals and positions. A similar approach

is taken in many other stanzas in Ruby, particularly in the stanzas highlighted in

bold, using either the Whinfield translation, or FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, as starting

points.

11 This is a reference to St Jerome, as depicted in Caravaggio’s St Jerome

Writing (1605-1605). The image is of the poet translator at work, a motif that I

repeatedly return to during the course of Ruby.

12 This couplet translates from the Persian as “this isn’t the England of

enemies, this is the England of rebirth.” There are occasional passages in Ruby made

of foreign words and phrases, often derived from the Persian language. These

passages are never translated but left hanging in the original, barely decipherable to

those unfamiliar with these tongues. The aim is to try to connect languages without

the constraints of translation in a literal sense – to enjoy language for the sake of its

sounds as much as for its meanings. See note 69 (157), for a more detailed discussion

on the use of sounds, particularly foreign sounds, in Ruby.

13 In the English translation “The Task of the Translator” by Harry Zohn

(quoted here) the religious connotation of Benjamin’s terms is sometimes less

obvious than in the German original. What Zohn refers to as “obscure and

impenetrable” hints at a mystery or spiritual element to Benjamin’s thinking on

translation. Sarah Dudek (2004) argues that “The Task of the Translator” is “bound

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to the Cabbalistic tradition, which is in itself enigmatic and contradictory—and so is

Benjamin’s essay” (3). Benjamin promotes an all-embracing notion of language as

the basis of translation: the world is made of language and the final aim is to

understand this “textus” of the world, to achieve a synergy in some sense between

the inadequate human languages and the language of God.

14 The relationship between form and meaning is deliberately obscured in

Ruby. It would be wrong to suggest that there are no meanings behind the words.

Overall, however, I try to avoid presenting the poetry in such a way that restricts the

reading to one transparent and proscribed understanding. In common with many

other avant-garde compositions, such as Bergvall’s “Via” which is subtly referenced

here, the aim is to open up the text and encourage the reader to assign his or her own

interpretation. Often a clear understanding of the “meaning” of the text is secondary

to the effects of the language itself. Avant-garde poetry movements have often

emphasised language over meaning, none more so than the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

school, which was most active in North America in the 1970s through to the early

1990s. The terms “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” and “Language poetry” are multi-faceted

and beyond the scope of this discussion, but the poetics of this movement raised

important questions about the relationship between language and meaning. Writing

in Open Letter (Summer 1977), two of its key proponents, Charles Bernstein and

Bruce Andrews, admit that “if it can be summarised at all […Language poetry…]

has had to do with exploring the numerous ways meanings can be (and are) realised

— revealed — produced in writing” (46). As Ian Davidson writes in Ideas of Space

in Contemporary Poetry “the Language writers operate within that tension between

word without referent and word with direct referent” (92). Language poetry chased

the art form back to its source – in this case words more often than sounds or letters;

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the idea was that language should dictate meaning rather than the other way around.

The movement was motivated by mistrust of the authority of the confessional voice,

but also a mistrust of lyricism and grammar. Ruby, just as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

poetry before it, breaks sentences into disjointed phrases and breaks phrases into

words in order to cleanse language of complacency and banality.

15 This is a reference to Basil Bunting's translation of Ferdowsi’s epic poem

The Shahnameh as presented Bunting’s Persia (2012). Bunting gives us a subtle new

West-Eastern symmetry when he links Hafiz to Catullus by using “desinas ineptire”

(an echo of Catullus’ poem number 8) as an epigraph at a moment of anguished yet

comic self-recognition: “Give respectability and pride the go-by, Hafiz,/ cadge

yourself a drop of booze and get/ crapulously drunk” (27).

16 Turquoise has been regarded for thousands of years as a holy stone in a

number of cultures, and particularly in the Middle East as a bringer of good fortune

or as a talisman. The oldest evidence for this claim was found in Ancient Egypt,

where grave furnishings with turquoise inlay were discovered, dating from

approximately 3000 BC. In ancient Persia the sky-blue gemstones were worn round

the neck or wrist as protection against evil. Turquoise mining and trading were

important Persian industries at the time of Khayyam, so he is likely to have been

very familiar with its properties and superstitions. See David Pogue’s The turquoise:

a study of its history, mineralogy, geology, ethnology, archaeology, mythology,

folklore, and technology (1915), for a more detailed discussion on the subject.

17 Corruption of a quote from Robert Duncan in Lisa Jarnot’s article "Robert

Duncan — The Ambassador from Venus" in Jacket magazine (October, 2004): “I am

after all a poet, not a responsible philosopher” (12).

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 18 Some of the writing in Ruby is found material, in other words existent texts

selected from other sources and tailored to meet the needs of the composition. Atkins

often applies the same principle of using found material in his poetic translations of

Petrarch (2011), such as “Poem 186.” Here, Petrarch states how eternally great

Laura is and how he imagines her effect on the classical heroes. Atkins’ poem places

her in dialogue with, and imagines her through, the use of historical and

contemporary writers by using a collage of famous first lines from a variety of texts

that he found by surfing the Internet and by pulling random books from his

bookshelf. As Atkins states in The Seven Types of Translation use of found text

“brings to contemporary readers a vibrant, artificial, literary creation, similar [in

certain aspects at least] to the Laura who appears in Petrarch’s original poem. Again,

the game of recognition (for readers) of sources and the element of surprise in their

combination, along with the overarching theme of literary love, makes up the key

elements of [this kind of translation]” (85).

19 The “mode of glory” mentioned here is a reference to Basil Bunting’s Ode

no. 36: “a glory neither of stone/nor metal, neither of words/nor verses, but of the

light” (Collected Poems 173). I am making connections here between Ruby and the

poetic translations of modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting and of the

British Poetry Revival, particularly Allen Fisher and Robert Sheppard, all of whom

are alluded to in this poem. The fourth line is a reference to Openned, a poetry

collective co-founded by Steven Willey and Alex Davies in 2006. This loose

grouping of predominantly London-based poets worked almost entirely with

innovative poetic forms. Willey and Davies hosted a poetry series of the same name

which was convened at The Foundry, a temporary arts and music space in the

basement of a former bank – hence the reference to “the vaults.” At these events,

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which ran from 2007 to 2010, a number of poets performed innovative translations

of older texts, including Tim Atkins, Caroline Bergvall and myself. This page also

includes references to the innovative publishing house Barque Press and to the work

of Jeff Hilson, with allusions to his sequence Bird bird (2009). One common thread

in the work of all these poets, and reflected here, is a focus on or acute awareness of

poetry as concerned with the process of perception, consciousness or the putting into

language of language itself, rather than on what is perceived or experienced – “songs

not of stone . but of light.” The events, objects and emotions represented in the

language of Ruby are important, but not as important as the language itself. I would

argue that in this respect Ruby is an example of language-centred writing that

operates in what I describe here as “the mode of glory.”

20 From Bunting's translation of an untitled Manuchehri poem (Bunting’s

Persia 47-49): “Before morning night was blacker/ for the white snow wasting

away/and out of the hard ground rose a mud like fishglue” (48).

21 There are allusions, particularly with “a policy of time,” to Allen Fisher’s

poetic sequence Gravity as a Consequence of Shape (2004). In Robert Sheppard’s

essay “New Memories: Allen Fisher's Gravity as a Consequence of Shape” on his

blogsite, Sheppard points out that the “pertinent poetry for Allen Fisher demands that

it deconstructs consistent and chreodic memory.” ‘Chreod’ is a biological term that

means a necessary path, whose charge is canalised once started in a certain direction.

Fisher both describes and enacts this process in the text “Philly Dog,” part of Gravity

as a Consequence of Shape, which Sheppard points out is “located in multi-

dimensional space-times in which crossovers correspond to catastrophes folds on the

surface that suspend descriptive referential functions and any temporal character of

my experience and lead into a world unfolded by every narrative.”As in Gravity as a

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Consequence of Shape, through techniques of textual rupture and jumps, Ruby

intuitively invents new memories – memory becomes a reinvigorated invention of

perception. The techniques of creative linkage involve the construction of multiple

othernesses, from different times and places, along with a resultant polyphony of

voices. Critically, when I apply these techniques, they disturb any propensity for

consistency or a single referent in the discourse. In other words, I have used the

pathways of chreodic memory in Ruby through a series of catastrophic, yet poetically

provocative, crossovers.

22 I frequently use a punctuation mark in Ruby, which I call the “punctum.”

The term was used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980) – see page 183 for a

more detailed discussion of the relationship between my punctum and Barthes’ term.

It resembles a full stop, and its effect is to create a pause in the middle of a line,

which is approximately the same duration as a caesura. The punctum is reminiscent

of a similar mark used by American poet Robert Duncan in some of his later work,

such as in Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). It is virtually the only punctuation

mark I use in the poetic passages of Ruby (i.e. the text on the right hand side). My

use of a single punctuation marking is rooted in a desire to create simplicity and

unity throughout the work, allowing the words to speak for themselves and to

connect with each other, with the minimum of restriction from the formal rules of

writing. In Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1960), Duncan argues that a

“longing grows to return to the open composition in which the accidents and

imperfections of speech might awake intimations of human being [without

restriction]… I work at language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a

course, and so, blindly. In this I am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a

way. For the way is itself” (402). Ruby is a continuation of Duncan’s poetics of

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punctuation, with the spring of water being as unencumbered as possible on its

journey to find a course.

23 A reference to my earlier poetic sequence, Lion (2010): “Iran is like a hall

of mirrors/the more you see . the more you think you understand/the less you

understand” (37).

24 Benjamin (5). According to Benjamin, the act of translation is actually two

acts, one from the position of established meaning and one from the position of a

new translation act, which seeks to challenge current understandings. It is as a result

of this encounter that a dialogical relationship occurs and that something new is

learned and re-learned.

25 This is a reference to Olson’s long narrative sequence The Maximus Poems

(1968). Maximus is an epic of place, centred on the city of Gloucester Massachusetts

in the twentieth-century but mediated through the voice of Maximus, an imagined

figure partly based on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Ancient Greek philosopher, and

partly on Olson himself. I am not seeking to emulate the epic scale of Maximus, but I

am interested in its meshing of geographies and histories and Ruby reflects this

interest, for instance with my transference of Khayyam to the modern-day west

where I “come back to the geography of it,/ the land falling off to the left” (109). As

in Allen Fisher’s Place (2005), the aim in Ruby is to strike down through the layers

of history that exist at specific geographical places. I attempt to ‘place’ the reader not

just within a specific locale, but within its multiple and interconnected layers of

cultural and political history. I also aim to make connections between the histories of

locations that may be more or less familiar to the reader. As with Maximus, Ruby is

simultaneously a study of the past and the present as well as the familiar and the

unfamiliar.

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 26 This stanza is clearly not set in medieval Nishapour, with its references to a

car, a mobile telephone and, equally unconvincingly, seagulls (Khorasan province is

land-locked). This is all the more strange given that the previous stanza suggests

another more Eastern place. There is a deliberate mixing up of locations as a means

of defamiliarisation. See note 70 (158), for a more detailed discussion of how I apply

defamiliarisation to Ruby.

27 (Benjamin 8). Translation in Ruby attempts to disarticulate the original. It

is in a sense a pure language that is only concerned with language, often deliberately

dismantling or at least disrupting meaning. As Paul de Man states in his Cornell

lecture, “Conclusions: The Task of The Translator” (1983), “what translation does,

by removing the burden of meaning, is [bring] to light what Benjamin calls “die

Wehen des eigenen”—the suffering of what one thinks of as one’s own—the

suffering of the original language” (37). Re-interpretative translations such as Ruby

reveal, according to de Man, a suffering or alienation that is at its strongest when it is

in relation to our own language and culture, and when the original language is

disarticulated in a way that confronts us with our own alienation.

28 In his Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955), Guy Debord

defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the

geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and

behavior of individuals” (13). The psychogeographic approach taken here is one of

trans-geographic and trans-temporal relocation. Tim Atkins follows the same

principle at times in his poetic translations of Petrarch (2011), by re-fashioning

medieval Italy into modern-day Britain. In common with Petrarch, Ruby is a

disruption and re-connection of historical and geo-cultural elements. Geographically,

Ruby is simultaneously located in Britain and the Middle East, sometimes

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highlighting similarities and differences between the two places, but mostly simply

revelling in the rich specificity of the language the two places generate – “these

multiples . they enriches us.”

29 Nishapour is a town in eastern Iran and Omar Khayyam’s birthplace.

30 This is a reference to Hilson’s Bird bird, which uses the Latin names of

bird species as starting points for a series of poetic explorations. I am making

connections between Hilson’s expositions of language and the earlier poetry of

Khayyam, in other words “discovering our / life before . the / bird . bird” is a key

preoccupation of Ruby.

31 There is no single holy city that I am referencing here, although Khayyam

will have made journeys to Mecca and perhaps Jerusalem prior to the First Crusade.

By saying that “he always says it’s a holy city” I am hinting that the spiritual journey

of Ruby is not geographical or theologically fixed but rather contingent and

theoretical (or perhaps more precisely it could be described as ”theo-heretical”).

32 (Benjamin 9). According to Benjamin, a translation should engage with the

“aura” of a foreign text, enacting an interpretation that is informed by a history of

reception (“the age of its fame”). This interpretation does more than transmit

messages; it recreates the values that accrued to the foreign text over time. Gelley

writes in his essay “Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin” (1999): “In a way

that is characteristic of Benjamin's manner of displacing a conceptual register, aura

functions not so much as a concept or idea but rather as a differential marker, a

means of situating phenomena in light of their historical lapse. In speaking of aura

one already acknowledges being situated in a post-auratic phase” (5). My point in

raising this is not to pursue a discussion of this notoriously knotty notion but to

highlight that the exchange and renewal between two cultural subjects are very much

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at play in Benjamin's reflections on translation and this is reflected in my poetics as

manifested in Ruby. Consistently throughout Ruby there are two cultural traditions in

dialogue with one another and informing one another, and as I write in the third

stanza on the right hand side, it is as if “the east and west chatter/reminding and

redeeming/masking layers of time.”

33 This line is an allusion to the ancient Zoroastrian belief that the world is

supported on the horns of a bull. In astronomy, the Seven Sisters, or Pleiades, is a

cluster of stars that lie adjacent to the constellation Taurus the Bull.

34 A line from “Apus Apus” in Hilson’s Bird bird (12).

35
I make a reference here to the concept of a modern-day Ashik, the

wandering poet/musician or troubadour, and the assertion that the Khayyam of Ruby

is such an individual. The Ashik is, at a conceptual level, merely a regional

manifestation of a widespread cultural phenomenon, that of “the wise fool.” See note

117 (175) for a more detailed discussion of the concept of the wise fool. Khayyam as

an Ashik is no exception to this tradition. Like many wise fools before him, he is an

outsider existing on the fringes of the political and cultural establishment. He

operates beyond the jurisdiction of the laws of the mainstream, beyond even its

linguistic rules. He is also a traveller, an itinerant storyteller who works his tales by

knitting together his experiences from his travels. Finally, he is a mystic and a

sorcerer, with the power to smelt and monger words in the same way a Blacksmith

morphs his metals. In short, he is foolhardy enough to venture into the lawless

territories between linguistic and literary traditions and through his folly he offers the

reader access to other worlds – “I am the edges brother . breathe through me.”

36 From Jacques Derrida’s “What is ‘Relevant’ Translation?” (177). Derrida

addresses the issue of translation most explicitly in this essay. He is treating the term

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“relevance” which is primarily used in translation by Ernst-August Gutt, for instance

in his study Relevance Theory: A Guide to Successful Communication in Translation

(1992). Although Derrida does not directly mention Gutt’s work, he criticises the

concept of relevance in translation. For Derrida, relevant translation relies on the

supposed stability of the signifier-signified relationship. With his own translation of

a line from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice he challenges this stability and

promotes translation approaches that are more playful, ambiguous and inter-textual.

As Jeremy Munday points out in Introducing Translation Studies (2008), “it can be

argued that Derrida’s knowledge of translation studies was restricted, his linguistic

and cultural critique of the text add a depth and currency that enhances the

description of the translation process” (171). Similarly with Ruby I am less

concerned with relevance per se, and more pre-occupied with creating links between

multiple cultural threads. I am especially interested in weaving together medieval

Persian poetics, twentieth-century British and North American experimental writing

and contemporary Middle Eastern culture – however relevant, irrelevant or irreverent

these threads might be.

37 “Salaam” is the word for “peace” in Arabic, and is often used as a greeting

in Iran; a shortening of “Salaam Aleikum.” This line is partly an allusion to my poem

“Salaam Aleikum,” in The Wire and Other Poems (2012), where I critique the highly

ironic ways in which the term is used in speeches by some of the least peaceful

political leaders of the Middle East. Here in Ruby, I am presenting an alternative

meaning that rekindles the peaceful utopian origins of the word, but also playfully

introduces, through the addition of wine, an Epicurean spirit.

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 38 Olson: “I was so young my first memory was of a tent spread to feed

lobsters” (Maximus 110). Khayyam’s name means tent-maker, which may have been

the occupation of his father.

39 This line is a corruption of a couplet from the Sohrab Sepehri poem “Lost”

in The Eight Books (1976): “ahle Kaashaanam / ammaa shahre man Kashaan nist” –

which translates as “I come from Kashan / but Kashan is not my city” (97). The line

alludes to psychogeographic loss, or more specifically a loss of sense of personal

identity through alienation from place. Sepehri continues that “my city has lost / lost

me / to a frenzy of other houses, other beds” (24).

40 A line from my poem “War on Terror”, part of the sequence The Lexico

Project (2010).
41
Derrida, from “Unsealing ('the old new language')” in Points: Interviews,

1974-1994. (116). Derrida argues that writers have at their disposal a vast array of

cultural “relays” (newspapers, journals, books, media) and it is their

responsibility to unpack and retransmit these relays in original and creative ways.

42 A line from my poem “The Edges”, part of the sequence The Lexico

Project (2010).

43 This is a reference to the poet and translator Pierre Joris’s statement in A

Nomad Poetics (2003) that “there is no difference between inside and outside at the

poem’s warp speed” (92). Joris argues that it is “in-between” original and translated

texts that we gather a rounder and more textually rich understanding of poetry,

particularly the poetry of another language. It is a poetics that reads and understands

language “horizontally,” to use Joris’s term, and one that allows him to view the

poetry of the Maghreb, the poetry of Pound, Robert Duncan, Olson, and his own

poetry as contemporaneous and involved in an ever-deepening conversation about

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language. Joris explores this notion from his own written languages of French,

German, and English and also Arabic—and not just Arabic as a language but in the

way that an ethnographer must investigate how the language functions in a culture

and environment. To that end as a translator, Joris argues that his task is to piece

together the threads of the “textum” as he terms it, the invisible threads of language

that are woven together to create the final document. In the case of Maghrebi writers

such as novelist Driss Chraïbi, it is the langue fourche, the “forked tongue,” that

draws Joris’s attention. Joris takes into account the choice to write in the language of

the coloniser, French, while remaining on the lookout for the “ghostings of Arabic”

in the writing: “The coloniser’s language too is caught in an irresolvable double

bind: no language is a house the writer can simply inhabit, the only home is found in

the ever-shifting force field of the spaces of its internal contradictions.” This is a

“basic law of nomadicity,” as Joris calls it in his book of essays Justifying the

Margins (11).

44 Derrida (“What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation” 177). In addition to the

importance of this essay as a critique of relevance in translation, it is interesting to

note the method used to translate the text into English. It is effectively a

collaboration between Derrida and the translation scholar Lawrence Venuti. Venuti’s

translation often retains “technical” terms from the original French text in

parentheses. Also Venuti adds an introduction to his translation, a further

permutation of re-writing or re-interpreting, in which Venuti describes his own

translation strategy, highlighting his frequent use of the original French in

parentheses, “even when [it threatens] to twist the English into strange new forms”

(174).

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 45
Pers is an archaic name for Persia, as used in the ancient capital of the

Persian Empire, Persepolis.

46 A reference to Joris’s essay “On the Nomadic Circulation of Contemporary

Poetic” in Justifying the Margins (19). As Peter Cocklebergh points out in his review

of Justifying the Margins in Jacket magazine (2010), “book boundaries are literally

not drawn, permeated, obfuscated even, which allows the final and first sections of A

Nomad Poetics and Justifying the Margins, respectively, to function, as said, as a sort

of “transit zone” (2).

47 This alludes to Robert Hampson’s poetic sequence an explanation of

colours (2010), which blends political and lyrical elements together within a series of

poems “about” colours. In an explanation of colours Hampson uses colours in each

poem as a starting point for a broader discourse which uses experimental language as

its medium. I apply the same method in Ruby, for instance in part one where I write

of “evergreens” that I describe as the “beginning end of things . we talk . always

less” (36). Part one of Ruby is in one sense an extrapolation of this definition of

evergreens, a playful discourse on its symbolism, particularly its fragile continuity:

“evergreens dies too . sometimes” (41).

48
This stanza refers to the poem “The Boat” by Modernist Persian poet, Nima

Yushij (1923). In his biographical essay “Nima Youshij and New Persian Poetry”

(2000), Bashiri argues that there is a “middle zone” (5), which appears recurrently in

“The Boat.” This “middle zone” is an imagined cultural territory between the Middle

Eastern and Western worlds. There is also a reference in Yushij’s poem to the

concept of the sea and sea-shore as a psychogeographic “no man’s land” – a theme I

also explore here and elsewhere in Ruby.

49 From Derrida, Monolingualism and the Other (40).

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 50 I cross-reference Khayyam’s spiritual and physical journeys, often to the

west (to Isfahan for instance) with Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to

the Deep North, originally written in the seventeenth century in haibun form.

51 The reference here to “gin” makes a link between oxygen and alcoholic

spirits, but is also a play on the term “jinn” who are the mystical spirit figures of

Islam, sometimes called genies in the West.

52 The text here is from one of my previous compositions called “The Wire”

from The Wire and Other Poems (4). By revisiting “The Wire” I connect to a key

point in my poetic journey, but also reflect on the recurrent nature of some of the

themes in my work. Like Ruby, “The Wire” is partly set in Jerusalem, and both

pieces of work attempt to link classical Middle Eastern literary texts to contemporary

British and North American poetry through the medium poetic translation.
53
A reference to the concept of negative capability as a vehicle for lyrical

poetry. The term was first used by the Romantic poet John Keats to critique those

who sought to categorise all experience and phenomena and turn them into a theory

of knowledge. It has more recently been appropriated by philosopher and social

theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger to comment on human nature and to explain how

human beings innovate and resist within confining social contexts. The concept has

also inspired psychoanalytic practices and twentieth-century art and literary

criticism. See Unger’s Passion: An Essay on Personality (1984) for a more detailed

discussion on the social aspects of negative capability.

54 Derrida, (“What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation” 177). There is a quasi-

religious mysticism that permeates Derrida’s words here, and reflects some of the

religious preoccupations of Ruby as a whole. Derrida’s essay highlights a sense of

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“justice” coming from translation, whether it is “doing justice” to the original spirit

of a text, or achieving some form of cultural emancipation by rejecting the

unjustified reliance on a notion of relevance. In his book The Prayers and Tears of

Jacque Derrida: Religion without Religion (1997), John Caputo promotes the view

that Derrida’s use of the notion of justice is a playful proxy for God. Caputo argues

that in reading Derrida “I cannot say whether God is a translation of justice, so that

when I pray and weep over justice I am praying and weeping over God […] but faith

is a translation for something with an unknowing non-savior san savoir, which is

such that I cannot say what is a translation of what” (338). Similarly I never mention

God directly in Ruby, but I do explore issues such as justice, faith and cultural

freedom as a means of “under stand ing the uni verse.”

55 This is a reference to Hilson’s Bird bird that highlights the value of intra-

lingual translation, shifting the register of etymology to contemporary London

vernaculars.

56 Reflecting the astronomical theories of Ptolemy, it was widely believed at

the time of Khayyam that there were seven planets in the night sky and that, like all

other celestial objects, they revolved around the Earth. See M.C Mahoney’s

“Ptolemaic Astronomy in the Middle Ages” in J.R. Strayer’s Dictionary of the

Middle Ages (1990).

57 Ultimately, Ruby is only part of much bigger story: one with a countless

variety of narrative outcomes. In ABC of Reading TRG (1999), Peter Jaeger

highlights the value of multiple narratives as a means of engaging with a larger

contextual and critical universe. He reviews Derrida’s grammatology and its

implications on the work of the Toronto Research Group on rational geomancy and

macrosyntax. He asserts that in a universe of disunified multiplicity “the writer can

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never know the entire macrosyntactic context from which her readers draw … in

their account writing is reading and vice versa” (31). This disunity is an agent for

radical critique, which goes beyond the specificity of any individual motif. I attempt

to engage in such a critique in Ruby, by presenting a range of alternative narratives

and outcomes that are sufficiently ambiguous to allow readers to connect the text

with their own contexts. In the last part of Ruby I state this desire more explicitly:

“these are y(our) sounds and syn(tax) / y(our) con(text)s / in pieces” (124).
58
A visual approach is taken in this stanza, with just two words being broken

up and contracted to create a minimalist visual effect. In one respect this is

reminiscent of the shekasteh poetry of medieval and early modern Iran, where words

in Arabic calligraphy are placed at seemingly random points around the page. The

shekasteh form was an early example of a disjunctive style being used in poetry to

subvert and at least defamiliarise standard poetic forms. It was popular at times of

social alienation or division, such as during the Persian Civil Wars of the seventeenth

century – see Alice Taylor’s Book Arts of Isfahan: Diversity and Identity in

Seventeenth Century Persia (1995), for a more detailed discussion on this point (59-

64). Another strong influence here is the visual poetry of bpNichol, such as in The

Aleph Beth Book (1971). As Karl Young points out in his essay on Nichol’s concrete

poetry (1998), “Nichol loved to start everything over from scratch, from the simplest,

most common materials. Classic concrete gave him the opportunity to do that for a

time [with an emphasis on] the Roman alphabet and […] simple words repeated” (3).

As with Nichol’s concrete poetic work, Ruby seeks to find a musicality in simple

visual arrangements, and hints at a spiritual sub-narrative, through sparse and

meditative sounds and sound-breaks.

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 59 From Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” which first appeared in the

magazine Manteia (3), and later in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-

Text (142). Barthes argues here against the method of reading and criticism that

relies on aspects of the author's identity – their political views, historical context,

religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes – to distill

meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases

of the author serve as a definitive “explanation” of the text.

60 Is the study of literature an archeology? Is it an examination of the end-

products of cultural experiences that are now essentially dead, leaving nothing

behind other than symbols and the messages that lie behind these symbols? In his

first work, Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes argues that literary analysis was

essentially a posthumous affair. He contends that “literature is like phosphorous, it

shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die” (73).

Unlike metals such as iron or steel, which are constantly remoulded and revived,

phosphorous burns fast and gives the impression of impermanence. It leaves its mark

on the senses and on the memory of those that have seen it shine, but in itself it is

sparks quickly to its own death.

61 The reference to “field flowers” points to the poetry and poetics of Robert

Duncan. In The Opening of the Field (1960), Duncan employs a reoccurrence of

words and images, an overlapping of patterns and associations, and a forward-

moving yet reiterative development of ideas. This is evident in his individual poems

but also in the overall movement and organisation of the book. When The Opening of

the Field first appeared, ten years had already passed since Charles Olson published

Projective Verse (1950) and though many of Olson’s tenets are obviously connected

to the style and mode of Duncan’s writing, the book is a significant technical

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departure from Olson’s “FIELD COMPOSITION.” Duncan places himself “into the

open” as Olson puts it in “Projective Verse,” in terms of line, stanza, and overall

form, and “applies the large area of the poem as the FIELD where, all the syllables

and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other” (2). Yet this form

of poetic composition is entirely transformed in Duncan’s writing. Duncan had a

very specific idea in mind of what the theme of “the field” was meant to invoke.

Duncan gives an explanation of its meaning in his 1958 Guggenheim application: “...

the field was of a three-fold nature, ‘known intimately as the field of my own life,

intellectually as the field of language (or spirit), and imaginatively as the field given

to [all humanity] which spans many languages”(17). For Duncan, the word

continuously shifts inside its web of associations, beginning with the alteration that

occurs in rendering the book’s title out of the term “open field.” He contends that

“the field” of the title itself becomes the physical space of “a meadow” in the

opening poem but that this is only one of the many changes in figuration that the

word undergoes in The Opening of the Field: “the sun’s field,” “the field of

accumulated good,” “a field of rapture,” “my lovely field,” each of these phrases

echoing the nature of all human visions as they come to us “in a disturbance of

words within words / that is a field folded” (19). I appropriate the notion of the field

in Ruby as a landscape in which words can be transferred between languages and

literary traditions. This is a field that as Duncan states, “spans many languages,” but

critically it is a place on the edge of these languages. Words and sounds are

exchanged here with or without their original meanings. There is a disturbance not

only of words but of the meanings of words. This is a “field of flowers” but also a

place both real and imagined, a place both of nature and of the mind, a “made up”

place where “lang guages . ex changes.” It is a place that takes on the very contours

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of reality but ultimately challenges them through its broken narratives: “scythe .

smiles . stories.”

62 This line alludes to the modernist Iranian writer Forough Farrokhzad’s

poem “The Wind Will Carry Us” published posthumously in her selected poems

Rebirth (1998).

63 This stanza highlights the need to move away from fidelity in order to

inject creativity into the translation process. As the Toronto Research Group argue in

their analysis of translation in Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine

(1992), stepping away from the preoccupation with fidelity is itself a creative act

(32).

64 From Barthes (Image 144), the “him” in this passage is the poet Stéphane

Mallarmé. Barthes discusses the presence of the idea of authorial death in the works

of previous writers, and cites Mallarmé as a poet who stated that poetry “is language

which speaks” for itself and directly to the reader.

65 This stanza alludes to Canadian poet Fred Wah’s “First Personal Poem”

(1976). In his essay “Diminishing the Lyric I – Notes on Fred Wah & the Social

Lyric” in Open Letter (3), Louis Cabri highlights how Wah diminishes the

importance of the “I” in his lyrical poetry as a means of injecting social reflexivity.

As Cabri puts it, there are some poets such as Wah “who accept the necessity or

historical fact of social encodings in order to further both a fundamental critique of,

and change upon their existing ordering […] these poets sometimes diminish the

lyric I specifically so as to reflexively re-introduce the social into the lyric” (82).

This is also the approach I take in Ruby, moving away from the Romantic personal

ego and limiting the frequency and power of the “I.” Instead, I maintain what Cabri

calls “lyrical impulse” (79), by creating an expansive elemental field rich in

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intertextuality in order to articulate social conditions – as I write in the last stanza on

this page, “fire works and bon fires . im pulse we share.”

66 The “sea rose” motif is taken from the work of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) from

the poem of the same name in her collection Sea Garden (1916). It is in a sense a re-

invention of the “Golestan” (literally “rose garden”) or the classical Persian notion of

the rose as a conduit for romantic expression through heightened lyricism. The rose

of H.D. is a rose but not as the Persians would know it. Compared to traditional

notions of the rose, the sea rose carries a “complex of emotion,” as Ezra Pound puts

it, “suggesting a new, or more precisely a renewed way of being, free from the

accumulations of sentimentality, a sparse, hardened, ‘pagan’ renewal of spirit” (95).

In his essay “On ‘Sea Rose’” (1996), Michael Boughn argues that like Pound's rose

in the steel dust, William Carlos Williams' obsolete rose or Gertrude Stein's rose,

H.D.'s sea rose also speaks to a tradition of writing. The rose is not only a rose; it is

an inescapable convention of writing that even an assertion such as Stein’s “Rose is a

rose is a rose is a rose” in her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily” necessarily invokes. As

Boughn puts it, “if only in its attempt to negate it, the sea rose proposes a new

imagination of that convention, one that resonates with the renewed spirit” (3).
67
The original Rubaiyat was scattered with references to wine and drinking,

particularly within the context of some form of epicurean oblivion, and with a strong

undertone of the fulfillment of sexual desire. However Nasrollah Pourjavady argues

in “Opposition to Sufism in Twelver Shiism” (1999), that another metaphorical

reading revolves around the notion of wine as a driver for change and transformation,

and a rejection of the conventional order (615). There is a sense here of what Bakhtin

describes in his essay “Carnival and Carnivalesque” as the “carnivalistic sense of the

world” (Rabelais 2). To Bakhtin, carnival is not so much a performance, as a means

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of separating the performer from the restrictions of the everyday world – as he points

out, "the world standing on its head,” the world upside down (4). The carnival for

Bakhtin is an event in which all rules, inhibitions, restrictions and regulations that

determine the course of everyday life are suspended, and especially all forms of

hierarchy in society. Wine is an integral part of this suspension of everyday life. In

her web essay “Sequins, Heels and Tiaras” (2010), Desiree D’Alessandro argues that

through allusions to the mythology surrounding Dionysus and Jesus, Bakhtin stresses

the importance of wine as an agent of change, “the dying god is reborn.” Whilst wine

drinking has to a certain extent always been a part of Iranian culture, at the time of

Khayyam, there had been a significant clampdown on the previous more relaxed

attitudes to alcohol. Under the auspices of the jurist Sahih Al-Bukhari, many wine

taverns were closed down and their merchants banished or imprisoned. In this

context, my wine references in Ruby are not an acceptance of oblivion, but a

provocative and subversive rejection of it. See Najmieh Batmanglij, From Persia to

Napa: Wine at the Persian Table (2006), for a more detailed discussion of this

historical context (24-26).

68 Another form of translation used in Ruby is one based on homophonics. In

this instance the original Persian is “as kuzeh” which literally means “from the jug”

but I have translated it to match the sounds to English words as closely as possible.

The resultant translation, “ask you say” does not convey the original meaning

directly but sits quite effectively within the structure of the quatrain as a whole.

Hilson points out that “homophonic translation, the separation of words into their

phonemic constituents, forces the translator to move along a horizontal axis of

association rather than attending to the vertical axis of substitution” (Music, Text and

Translation 92). The horizontal axis leads to a more considered attention of the

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relations between words and highlights and their denotative rather than connotative

values. Hilson derives this notion of denotative values from Charles Altieri’s “The

Objectivist Tradition” where Altieri distinguishes between a Symbolist mode of

attention to language, which is broadly connotative, and an Objectivist mode, which

is largely denotative (29). Moving along the horizontal axis, as Hilson describes it,

can be powerful, even explosive. Indeed, on first examination, I misread denotation

as detonation and certainly in the case of Ruby I argue that detonative as well as

denotative value gives the homophonic translations their resonance. I use the

misinformation that these sound transfers to create as a way of detonating potentially

new and unexpected intertexts, and creating links between the languages and poetic

traditions.

69 This stanza is entirely written in Persian and there is no significant attempt

at providing translational markers, apart perhaps from the use of the Latin script

(Persian is normally written in a modified version of the Arabic alphabet) and the

first line “yerushaalem,” as some readers might discern, means Jerusalem. I

deliberately use a Latin transliteration here as I have designed it to be read aloud and

I have tried to make the phonetics as straightforward to follow as possible. My aim is

for the non Persian-speaking reader to still be able to read out the text and thus to

potentially engage with the sounds and rhythms of the language even if they cannot

understand the words. There is a parallel here to Khayyam’s own travels to places of

pilgrimage, where folklore has it that he found himself surrounded by people he

describes as “holy men” speaking a language he did not understand. See Amin

Maalouf’s Samarkand (1988) for a description of a (fictionalised) journey by

Khayyam such as this. I have no desire, however, to suggest that there is a mystical

quality to this speech act. I am simply taking the opportunity to connect with another

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culture at a non-lexical level: “they speak their tongue and I listen . there is no magic

here.” Bergvall applies a similar approach in her work “Cropper” (2006) which

includes phrases and sentence in Norwegian. Bergvall never translates or hints at the

meaning of these phrases, but their repetitive nature and their abrupt rhythms suggest

a certain intensity that contrasts with the English in the poem, and thus creates, as

with my poem, a kind of cross-cultural linguistic engagement that is not dependent

on meaning.

70 The bending of branches that I mention here symbolise the bending of

words and meanings in Ruby, based on techniques of defamiliarisation.

Defamiliarisation is the technique of presenting common things in an unfamiliar or

strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar. The term

“defamiliarisation” was first coined by Victor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as

Technique” (1917). Shklovsky invented the term as a means to “distinguish poetic

from practical language on the basis of the former’s perceptibility” (209). The

methods of defamiliarisation I use in Ruby involve a fragmentation of literary styles,

language, and speech registers. Punctuation is largely abandoned. Words and phrases

are broken and left unfixed, or joined to neighbouring words in unnatural ways.

Literary forms are changed and mixed together and the narrative is often broken or

disrupted. Overall there is a deliberate effort to create a sense of defamiliarisation

through dislocation, fragmentation and dysfunctionality. This defamiliarisation in

Ruby promotes a desire for reconnection with The Rubaiyat, but in new and

surprising ways. It influences perceptions of the design and structure of both texts,

with the use of potentially unexpected sounds, inconclusive and abstract narratives,

and with a multi-directional perspective on place and time. At one level, the aim of

this defamiliarisation is to decontextualise Ruby by shifting it away from The

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Rubaiyat both in terms of its form and its content. A new narrative structure is

devised, for instance, which assembles the work around an imaginary journey,

ostensibly by a subject figure not entirely dissimilar to Omar Khayyam, but

potentially re-located in the twenty-first century. For a discussion of the impact of

defamiliarisation on contemporary experimental poetry, see the essay “Avant Garde

or Endgame?” in Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of

Media (1).

71 From Barthes (Image 138). The limitations of semiological analysis

become apparent when we explore the fringes of meaning. In “The Third Meaning,”

Barthes offers a reflection on some stills taken from a scene of the Eisenstein film

Ivan the Terrible. Barthes identifies two levels of meaning: the informational and the

symbolic. However, he wonders whether this is all that exists: is there perhaps a third

meaning – something else in the image that cannot be defined by the informational

and the symbolic? He concentrates on an image of an old woman just before she is

about to cry in ritualistic mourning. The expression on her face cannot be classified

by any traditional semiological analysis: “The characteristics of this third meaning is

to blur the separations between expressions but also to emphasise an artful

disposition perfectly absorbed by Eisenstein himself when he jubilantly quotes the

golden rule of the old Gillette: just short of the cutting edge!“ (106). Strictly

speaking, in semiological terms, the third meaning is meaningless because it cannot

be assigned to a code. I apply this notion of third meaning in Ruby through my

preoccupation with the very edge of meaning, the hinterland where words, registers,

moods and so on are somehow transferred from another place into our language. It is

often in unintentional links, such as homophonic connections, that the most

interesting exchanges take place. As I write in the accompanying poetry on the right

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hand side: “look beyond the cutting edge / daast on . is the stories . broken up” (73).

The “daast” is the first syllable of the Persian word “dasstaan” which means “story”

and the story is indeed fragmented, as is the word “daastaan.” Yes there is a

connection here with the English word “dust” even though there is no deliberate

symbolic link between the two words.

72 In The Invisible Kings (2007), a collection of poems written by David

Morley, an English writer of Romani descent, there is a deliberate desire to create a

response amongst English-speaking readers to the folklore and literary vocabulary of

the Romani. In the poem “The Kings,” Morley tells of the journeys and the trials of a

gypsy Ashik, a Romani man of the Blacksmiths' tribe, the Boorgoodjides, who

moves between the worlds of Roma and Gajo or non-Roma majority (9).

73 Morley makes an emphatic and overt connection in The Invisible Kings

with his ancestral traditions through the use of Romani words, registers, folklore etc.

He also offers little touches of familiarity to non-Romani readers: such as the myth

of the exotic gypsy with his metalwork, jewellery, superstition etc. However, for me

the most important reference is when he says that he is “the king’s fool,” that he is at

the unlawful edge of the world, where there is only “the laws of the hedgerows” (10).

I investigate this fool more closely in Ruby where the fool is a useful companion on

our journey in to the Hinterland.

74 The king in question here is the historical Bahram V (420-438 AD) of the

Sassanid dynasty, who was fond of hunting wild ass; indeed his nickname was

“Bahram the Wild Ass.” The Persian word for wild ass, “gur,” also means “grave”

and the close proximity of the “ass” and the “grave” in the second line of the stanza

is an attempt to capture the spirit of the original pun, which is further emphasised

through the phonic echoes of the ass in “assess” and to a lesser extent “palace.”

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 75 The reference to “low windows” is a playful take on High Windows, a

collection of poems by Philip Larkin (1974). Larkin was an ardent critic of

Modernism and fought against avant-garde influence in British poetry, most notably

through a poetry group that became known as “The Movement.” Peter Riley

criticises Larkin in Jacket magazine (2004) for his indiscriminating and ideologically

narrow position: “What after all were Larkin and The Movement but a denial of the

effusive ethics of poetry from 1795 onwards, in favour of ‘this is what life is really

like’ as if anyone thought for a second of simply representing observable ‘life’?”

(34). For instance, in the poem “Going, Going,” Larkin expresses a romantic fatalism

towards a notional England that anticipates the complete destruction of the

countryside, and champions an idealised sense of national togetherness and identity:

“And that will be England gone ... it will linger on in galleries; but all that remains

for us will be concrete and tyres” (190). The poem ends with the blunt statement, “I

just think it will happen, soon.” Yet in Ruby, England is not gone, whatever “will

happen” has happened, but the church bells still ring, and that England will continue

to “carry on . in a flurry of the new.”

76 This line alludes to the Leonard Cohen song “Bird on the Wire,” included

in his 1969 album Songs from a Room. In the 1960s, Cohen lived on the Greek island

of Hydra with his girlfriend Marianne (the woman depicted on the back cover of

Songs from a Room). She has related how she helped him out of depression by

handing him his guitar, whereupon he began composing "Bird on the Wire" –

inspired by a bird sitting on one of Hydra's recently installed phone wires, followed

by memories of wet island nights. Cohen is dealing here with the consequences of

his own self-destructive and deeply melancholic Romanticism —with what Sandra

Djwa calls “black Romanticism” (94). In common with “Bird on the Wire,” Ruby is a

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form of catharsis or expiation, something associated with the dark night of the soul,

but which seeks to overcome it through some sort of re-connection with older

mystical traditions. For all the personal dark deviations and near despair that they

acknowledge, Cohen carries on, Khayyam carries on, both in the style of jaded,

reluctant prophets.

77 In the original Khayyam rubai, the birds say “coo” which in the Persian

also means “where” – the pun in my poem revolves around twitter – a more

contemporary juxtaposition of bird song and social networking.

78 This line is the name of one of my previous poems, which appeared in The

Wire and Other Poems (22).

79 This quatrain alludes to The Conference of the Birds, a poetic sequence of

approximately 4500 lines written in Persian in the twelfth century by Farid ud-Din

Attar. In the poem, the birds of the world gather to decide who is to be their king, as

they have none. The hoopoe, the wisest of them all, suggests that they should find the

legendary Simorgh, a mythical Persian bird roughly equivalent to the western

phoenix. The hoopoe leads the birds, each of whom represent a human fault, which

prevents man from attaining enlightenment. When the group of thirty birds finally

reach the dwelling place of the Simorgh, all they find is a lake in which they see their

own reflection. Besides being one of the most celebrated examples of Persian poetry,

this book relies on a clever word play for instance between the words Simorgh,

which is a symbol often found in sufi literature, and “si morgh”, meaning “thirty

birds” in Persian, and which is a common basket size of poultry birds being sent to

slaughter in the Middle East. There are obvious parallels here with Chaucer’s

Parliament of Birds, although the two poems are not directly linked.

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 80 Noctilucent clouds are astronomical phenomena that are the “ragged-

edges” of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called mesospheric clouds

in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of

water ice and are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes

between 50° and 70° north and south of the Equator. They are thus very rare in the

Middle East but reasonably common in Northern Europe, hence the reference to “a

north land.”

81 Norouz is the Persian New Year, which falls on the Vernal Equinox.

82 The phrase “corridor of uncertainty” is taken from the former international

cricketer and broadcaster Geoffrey Boycott who uses the term to describe an area

where a cricket ball can pitch during a delivery, a narrow line on and just outside a

batsman's “off stump.” The name is derived from the opinion that this is the area in

which a batsman struggles most to determine whether to play forward or back, or

whether to leave the delivery. In Ruby I would argue that every page has its own

corridor of uncertainty running down the middle and separating the ‘philosophical’

prose on the left from the poetry on the right. The reader is constantly faced with the

same dilemma as the batsman – whether to play the shot and engage with the

philosophy or seek to protect the poetry – the rubais on the right. The prose is largely

Western in origin, whilst the poetry has its roots in the Middle East. There is an

analogy again here with cricket, a sport with strong link to the British Empire, and its

attempts at cultural proselytisation. However it should be noted that recent studies

suggest that cricket has its origins in the Ancient Egyptian game of Seker Hemet, and

that it was introduced to Europe in the Middle Ages by gypsies travelling through

Persia (Piccioni 12). These sporting contradictions reflect an uncertainty in Ruby

between my engagement with the original texts and contexts, and my desire to

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ground my work in Western literary theory. This unresolved anxiety is a central

component of Ruby, “by its very nature . it stumps us” (85).

83 There is a synecdochal hint at an authorial presence (“our hands did this”)

but it is elusive (“on dust”). “Dust” is explicitly compared here with “daast” which is

half the Persian word for story ("daastaan") and close to the Persian word for hand

(“dast”). Cross-linguistic ambiguity abounds, with the use of standard and dialectic

English, Persian and a broken semi-intelligible meshing of English and Persian (“is

daast on dust”). As Peter Robinson points out in Poetry & Translation: The Art of

the Impossible (2010), applying this type of meshing of linguistic references acts as a

form of cultural transfer, a sharing of poetics across poetic traditions (103). Similarly

in Ruby I am collapsing and reforming the words of more than one language to create

a shared musicality that promotes the rhythms of two or more languages in one new

and hybrid text.

84 As well as being a poet, Omar Khayyam was an accomplished

mathematician and astronomer. According to some accounts, Khayyam devised a

new calendar in order to impress and aggrandise his Seljuk ruler. The Jalali calendar,

named after the Sultan, is according to Edward Richards in Mapping Time (1998),

more accurate to the mean tropical year than the Gregorian calendar that was devised

some 500 years later (91). The modern Iranian calendar is based on his calculations,

and Amin Razavi argues is central to Iran’s sense of national identity and cultural

difference (38).

85 I have taken the texts on the left hand side in this section from Thus Spake

Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883). In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche

explores, interprets and heavily embellishes the teachings of a Persian mystic and

poet, Zarathustra. In this particular passage, Nietzsche presents Zarathustra as a

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lonely wanderer and outcast in foreign lands, an Ashik (23). Thus Spake Zarathustra

is important to Ruby because of the centrality of the concept of the Ashik in both

works. Nietszche’s Zarathustra is a man on the fringes who seeks to unsettle and re-

orientate the world through a mix of mystic insight, poetry and intuition. The Omar

Khayyam of Ruby is doing much the same and the two men meet in this section, and

exchange “the loneliness of the east and the west.”

86 From the Sanskrit, “thus spake the holy one,” which is taken from the

Zandavesta, the holy book of the Parsees, an Indian religious group who follow the

teachings of Zarathustra. It is also from these words that Nietszche derived the title

of his book.

87“Baaraan” means “rain” in Persian.

88 From Nietzsche (Zarathustra 23). Too much information causes

indigestion of the spirit, according to Nietzsche; we shall “choke on our reason.” In

Introducing Nietzsche (1997), Laurence Gane argues that for Nietzsche, the

knowledge we share must be relevant and useful to our specific cultural projects, and

once shared this knowledge leaves us and enters a common epistemological space or

knowledge bank (69). In this respect I am attempting in Ruby to provide an antidote

to the overwhelming quantity of information available on The Rubaiyat by “finding a

way through . my words my game my rules.”

89 The original Rubaiyat refers to Magian wine, in other words the cult of the

Magi, an alternative name for Zoroastrian priests, who use wine as part of many of

their religious ceremonies.

90 Nietzsche: “I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be

surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?” (Zarathustra 24): Nietzsche’s notion

of the Superman is sometimes misconstrued in evolutionary terms, in other words as

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an inevitable development towards a superior lifeform – see for instance H.L.

Mencken’s introduction to The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (37). Yet

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra sees the Superman as far from inevitable – rather as an

extreme challenge to the human spirit. Indeed, as Gane argues in Introducing

Nietzsche, the Superman may never be realised, but Nietzsche insists that we have an

obligation to strive towards it as it connects us with the “ultimate meaning of the

earth” as he calls it. In Ruby I am making a connection between Nietzsche’s

aspiration for the Superman, and the Sufic concept of universal wisdom, or the desire

to become one with nature by achieving a transcendental state: “above us . above

man/in the ways of water/and earth and.” Whilst alluding to Eastern mysticism, the

Sufism of Ruby is firmly grounded in Western discourse. The “spirit of the Shah” in

this passage is a reference to Idries Shah, who with works such as Book of the Book

(1969), re-ignited interest Sufism in the West. In his writings, Shah presents Sufism

as a universal form of wisdom that predated Islam. Emphasising that Sufism was not

static but always adapting itself to the current time, place and people, he frames his

teaching in Western psychological terms. As with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or my

Ruby, Shah makes extensive use of traditional teaching stories and parables, texts

that contained multiple layers of meaning designed potentially to trigger insight and

self-reflection in the reader. Shah was at times criticised by Orientalists who

questioned his credentials and background (84). His role in the controversy

surrounding a new translation of The Rubaiyat, published by his friend Robert

Graves and his older brother Omar Ali-Shah, came in for particular scrutiny. Peter

Wilson wrote that if Shah had been a swindler, he had been an “extremely gifted

one,” because he had taken the time to produce an elaborate and internally consistent

“proxy for the East,” and had “provoked and stimulated thought in many diverse

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quarters” (195). Ruby’s Sufism is a similar proxy, a re-invention based on a Western

discourse seeking to re-connect with an Eastern text of dubious provenance, seeking

to provoke and stimulate, although perhaps not in such diverse quarters.

91 The region of Persia that lies along the Tigris River, which is known today

as Iranian Kurdistan, but which Khayyam would have known as Persian Iraq, was

famed for its flute music at the time of the original Rubaiyat.

92 Nietzsche: “Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much

within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than

any of the apes” (Zarathustra 24).

93 I often use the technique of unfinished or “hanging” enjambments in Ruby,

where I deliberately end a line abruptly with an incomplete phrase. The common

expectation with enjambment is that there is some kind of continuation across lines

and stanzas. The line ending in this respect is a form of control, where the flow of

words is deliberately broken in order to emphasise a particular image or segment of

the narrative. However my hanging enjambments are not sustained, which in itself is

potentially unexpected and defamiliarises the subject of the work. It also encourages

the reader to fill in the gaps and end the word flow themselves, or perhaps to reflect

on its fractured and imperfect state. In his blog review of Alan Dugan’s poem “The

Morning Here” (2005), Ron Silliman highlights the potential power and influence of

the hanging enjambment. He argues that its effect, “because we expect the final word

of one line to lead somewhere, is to minimise the gap between the end of one line

and the start of the next. This is what I meant the other day when I referred to the

concept of unfinished enjambment as a specific literary device & the idea has been

haunting me since then.” Silliman compares Dugan’s work with that of James

Schuyler and stresses that both poets “clearly don’t want you to hear that pause –

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there are lines that read, in their entirety, on the skin so that become almost unless

they recede almost to the point of invisibility. That recessiveness is absolutely

necessary though, in order to foreground a deliberately askew syntax.” The key point

with the approach I take with Ruby is that these hanging lines are often at the end of

stanzas. They “recede to the point of invisibility” at the end of something, which

allows the reader the opportunity to reflect on that that point, rather than minimise

the space with the next line. The broken syntax is thus a quiet space for the reader,

“a fragment of” whatever he or she wants it to be.

94 From Nietzsche (Zarathustra 24). The body, in other words, is not the

external tool of an inner sovereign mental ego, but an organism within which the

ego, or mind, that plays a subordinate role. Nietzsche is not suggesting that the body

cannot be transformed by the mind, but certainly it has the upper hand, and it would

be foolish to suggest that it does not. There is also a suggestion here that this body

connects with a super-organism, and that by accepting our subservience to our

bodies, we are asserting the existence of a single connecting entity, “a uni verse”

mentioned on the other side of the page.

95 An allusion to a line from the Forough Farrokhzad poem “The Gift”,

published posthumously in her selected poems Rebirth (1998), which begins with the

line, “I speak out in the night.” Farrokhzad often used nature images at night-time to

create a sense of desolation and alienation. There is also a quiet beauty and dignity in

her imagery, the possibility of re-growth and reparation, which I emphasise here with

the words “branches are hints of hope.”

96 From Nietzsche (Zarathustra 26). The reference to a rope here is another

connecting point between Nietzsche and the Ashik. The rope itself is a conceit that

plays on the fragile link between the ordinary mortality of Man and infinite power of

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the Superman. However, the rope also links the mainstream world of Man with the

fringes of society, represented by the outcast Superman. The poetic side of Ruby

makes productive use of this idea, with the Ashik also providing “ a rope for /

whispering home truths.”

97 One intriguing historical Rubaiyat phenomenon was the emergence of

Omar Khayyam clubs in the West at the end of the nineteenth century. These were

private men’s dining clubs dedicated to the celebration of the poetry of Omar

Khayyam. Members of these upper-class establishments would don faux Middle

Eastern attire and be served wine by semi-dressed women in the style of the harem.

As Michelle Kaiserlian argues in her paper “The Imagined Elites of the Omar

Khayyám Club” (2011), these clubs became ritual spaces in which participants

praised their own elite status and crafted a covert identity through the vehicle of The

Rubaiyat and the imagined costumes and practices of the Middle East (Poole,

Ruymbeke, Martin and Mason 172). Re-imagining ourselves through ritualistic play

is still of relevance to Ruby: I playfully suggest here that the reader might want to do

the same, because we “have hats too . places to play.”

98 In Persian culture good fortune is associated with being awake and vigilant,

in other words “eyes wide eyed.”

99 A reference to Yushij’s poem “The Boat” (1923) – see note 48 (148), for

more details on this. There is also a reference to the concept of the sea and sea-shore

as a psychogeographic “no man’s land” – a theme I return to repeatedly in Ruby –

see note 43 (146), for a further discussion on this topic.

100 Persian wine bowls at the time of Khayyam often had a line of verse

inscribed in the inside rim, which would only be revealed upon drinking the wine.

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This is thus a conceit on the potentially revelatory and transcending effect of wine-

drinking, even though it is an “all too brief effect.”

101 Jamshid is a mythical hero of Persian culture, appearing most notably in

Ferdowsi’s tenth-century epic poem The Shahnameh. He was attributed a magic cup

in which he could see past events, and all the places of the world and by which,

rather like Joseph and his silver cup, he could predict the future.

102 In his autobiography Ecco Homo (1888), Nietzsche speaks of his

experience of writing Thus Spake Zarathustra and how he at times felt like a

mystical conduit, linking physical and spiritual worlds. He states: “if one had the

slightest trace of superstition left in one, it would be hard to deny the idea that one is

the incarnation, mouthpiece and medium of almighty powers” (101). Once again this

idea of the poet-philosopher as a “medium” or “mouthpiece” is very relevant to

Ruby, with its emphasis on Omar Khayyam as an example of a “middleman”

connecting East and West in a new and radical ways, in other worlds: “the return / of

the middle men . the danger men.”

103 From Nietzsche (Zarathustra 258). This reference reflects Nietzsche’s

notion of the circle of time, or the eternal recurrence of things. Nietzsche stresses the

significance of our present actions – whatever we do now will return to us, again and

again. It implies an exhortation that is deeply Sufic in quality: strive to be greater

than you are, to overcome yourself, to “reach the realm of the clouds.” Ruby reflects

this approach – Omar is unencumbered by the past – the present moment is what

matters – and he attempts to make best use of it.

104 The “x” here denotes the voiceless velar fricative, a type of consonantal

sound used in most Middle Eastern Languages, including Persian. It is not commonly

used in Modern English, although it occasionally appears as in the Scottish English

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word “loch.” The voiceless velar fricative was part of the phonology of Old and

Middle English but later disappeared from the English Language. Indeed, correct

readings of Chaucer emphasise it in the pronunciation of words such as knight and

wight (in which “gh” represents the voiceless velar fricative). This means that at the

time of Khayyam, both Persian and English would have had the sound in common.

However by the end of the fifteenth century it had largely been abandoned in the

English language. There are various theories concerning the reasons for the decline

in the voiceless fricative in English. In Linguistic Change and the Great Vowel Shift

(1972), Patricia Wolfe argues that the loss of a number of consonants ran in parallel

with a phenomenon known as the “The Great Vowel Shift,” when longer more

French-sounding vowel patterns gave way to shorter or diphthongal phonemes (17).

One theory for these phonological changes is that they were an assertion of

Britishness at a time of prolonged conflict with France. The loss of the voiceless

fricative is perhaps a rejection of the foreign, even if that foreignness results in

cultural isolation and a rejection of the origins of the English language (90). By

introducing this sound into Ruby, I am thus making a deliberate effort to reconnect

the English language not just with other cultural traditions, but also with its own past.

105 From Nietzsche (Zarathustra 258). This quotation reminds us of the

transformational power that Nietzsche attributes to poetry. Nietzsche writes in

“Through the Circle of Dionysos–Dithyrambem” that the poet “willingly and

knowingly lies / can alone tell the truth” (Zarathustra 103). In The Peacock and the

Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche (2010), James Luchte argues that “the poet, through

his or her own playful deceit, can disclose makeshift truths between earth and

heaven, new lie/truths” (29).

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 106 I allude here to Bergvall’s Meddle English (2011), a contemporary

response to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which in common with Ruby relies in part

on appropriated texts. Bergvall for instance “transcribes” Carolee Schneemann’s

1965 film Fuses and weaves it into her neo-Chaucerian narrative. In an introduction

to Fuses on her website, Schneemann describes Fuses as a silent film of collaged and

painted sequences of lovemaking between herself and her then partner, composer

James Tenney, as observed by her cat, Kitch. In a web review of Meddle English in

The Constant Critic (2012), Vanessa Place ponders the way in which works of

appropriation (collage, transcription, etc.), instead of merely disavowing authorship

as one might expect, tend to shore up the appropriator and re-inscribe the

author. Place points out that “although Meddle English is a concerted performance

of polyvocality, the only voice heard is Bergvall’s. Bergvall is the only point of entry

and departure for the book…there is Bergvall, acting as interlocutor and writer and

performer.” We are thrown, Place contends, back into the lap of the one who writes:

“as in tongue, as in mouth, as in mind.” Using the language of a mathematical proof,

Place proposes the following tautology: “Bergvall proves Bergvall.” Place is of

course herself, through her own selection of texts, offering such a mathematical

circularity (in other words “Place proves Place”) but nonetheless the point she makes

is pertinent to my approach to poetic translation. I follow a similar path in Ruby,

becoming an active participant in the dialogue with the reader, and in my rejection of

traditional notions of Middle Eastern poems in translation. At times, as in this

section, the original Khayyam is superfluous in these efforts and like Bergvall, I take

centre stage as writer and performer – “it is me who writes it . meddles . some

times.”

107 Olson: “I have this sense,/that I am one/with my skin” (Maximus 111).

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 108 From Bakhtin’s essay “Epic and Novel” (1941), where he argues that the

epics have their origins in an older oral song tradition, which allowed for greater

fluidity in terms of the words, registers and narratives used (Dialogic 14).

109 In parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, when a baby is born a

quince tree is planted as a symbol of fertility, love and life.

110 This is a reference to Bakhtin’s analysis of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays in which Bakhtin promotes Eugene Onegin as

an example of poetry “which exemplifies the elusiveness of generic boundaries and

the subversion of authorial intentionality through an engaged dialogue” (386). See

note vi (22) for a more detailed account of Bakhtin’s attitude to poetry.

111 Bakhtin argues that time is specifically significant in this genre as it never

effects change for the protagonist. Instead, “a logic of random disjunctions” or

potentially unexpected but necessary events impinge upon and interact with the

characters (Speech Genres 142). I use disjunctive sequences in Ruby in much the

same way – Khayyam the protagonist exists independent of time and his character is

not developed by the poetic sequences. Instead, I seek to enrich our understanding of

Khayyam and his work through techniques such as defamiliarisation – see note 70

(158), for a more detailed discussion of this.

112 Bakhtin argues in The Dialogic Imagination that language and literature

are ever evolving “living” phenomena, which are moulded and changed by the texts

produced within them. The meanings stemming from literature are adapted through a

dialogue with the texts from which they originate. To Bakhtin, all forms of language

have the capability to modify cultural forms using these dialogical means: “every

utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to a preceding utterance […]

language only lives in dialogical interactions of this kind” (91). By applying

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dialogical principles using my axis of dialogical poetics, I attempt to create what

Bakhtin described as “dialogical interactions” (91).

113
There are multiple references here to Sohrab Sepehri, and a deliberate

parallel is being drawn here between Sepehri’s work and the work of the

contemporary Irish American poet Marcus Slease. Sepehri is an important proponent

of the modernist school of Persian poetry first described by Hamid Siahpoush in The

Lonely Garden: Sohrab Sepehri's Remembrance (2003) as “the New Poetry” (11).

With an emphasis on innovative poetic techniques and breaking down traditional

forms, the New Poetry extends and refines the techniques of literary modernism to

make them more relevant to the more informal registers of late twentieth century

Persian. Complex in organisation, rich in vocabulary, Eight Books (1957)

demonstrates the intricacies of Sepehri’s writing. As Siahpoush argues, Sepehri is

usually present as protagonist-spectator yet his work expresses not his thoughts alone

but, most of the time, a kind of collective consciousness; and hence many different

forms and levels are negotiated but literal realism is immediately transcended (12).

Similarly in Hello Tiny Bird Brain (2012), Slease varies in medium from normative

prose to poetry that is highly elliptical, condensed, dislocated, and discontinuous. I

point out in my review of Hello Tiny Bird Brain in Hand & Star Magazine (2012)

that Slease brings to verse “a rhythm that is sometimes very strong—allusive,

liturgical, or incantatory—but that never employs rhyme or any regular pattern.” The

aim of both Eight Books and Hello Tiny Bird Brain, which I seek to emulate in Ruby,

is to create a profound and shattering disclosure of combat’s physical destruction and

spiritual outrage, which is sustained by a controlled and variegated tone which is

disarmingly poignant whilst still being politically rousing.

114 From Bakhtin (Dialogic 422), in his essay “Discourse in the Novel.”

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 115 This is a misheard intra-lingual response to Blake’s Songs of Innocence

and Experience. In his essay “Not the novel: Bakhtin, poetry, truth, God” (2001),

Graham Pechey argues that Blake’s work epitomises a failed dialogism, with its anti-

authorial expressivity merely replacing the old monologism of classical poetry with

the equally hegemonic poetic signification of Romanticism. – “for Bakhtin,

Romanticism breaks with the stylisation of the single voiced classicist word only to

put in its place a yet purer monologism of utterance from which all hint of refraction

from another’s word has been eliminated” (72-73). I argue here that much

contemporary experimental poetry, including Ruby, breaks down this kind of

formalist conceptual vocabulary, partly through irony, parody and playful techniques

such as this kind of mishearing.

116 From Bakhtin, in his essay “Methodology for the Human Sciences”

(Dialogic 159).

117 This is a reference partly to Enid Welsford’s notion of “the wise fool” in

The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1935) and partly to “the King’s Fool” of

David Morley in his sequence The Invisible Kings. The wise fool is a recurring

character in many literary traditions. He appears throughout the history of English

Literature in many guises: as the mascot, the scapegoat, the bard, the soothsayer, the

Lord of Misrule, and even the prophet. It is beyond the scope of my discussion here

to review all these manifestations, but as Enid Welsford argued in her 1935 classic

on the subject, the fool is nearly always amongst us. In some ways, he undermines or

stretches the norms of the dominant society, not simply for comic effect but also as a

source of inspiration for his audience. For Welsford “he is a man who falls below the

average human standard, but whose defects have been transformed into a source of

delight and inspiration… through the application of his folly” (97). Morley’s King’s

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Fool is no exception to this tradition. Like many fools before him, he is an outsider

existing on the fringes of mainstream society. He operates beyond the jurisdiction of

the laws of the Metropolis, beyond even its linguistic rules. He is also a traveller, an

itinerant storyteller who works his tales by knitting together his experiences from his

travels in two worlds: the Romani and domain of the Gajo. Finally, he is a mystic

and a sorcerer, with the power to smelt and monger words in the same way

Blacksmiths morph their metals. In Ruby, my wise fool is foolhardy enough to

venture into the lawless territories between linguistic and literary traditions and

through his folly he offers the reader access to other worlds, “doorways” to “a palace

of traceries.”

118 Olson remarked in his poem “Human universe” that it is has “gone so far,

that is science has, as to wonder if the fingertips, are not very knowing knots in their

own rights, like little brains, like photo-electric cells, I think they now call them”

(159).

119 Pechey (2001) argues that in one respect the discourse on Bakhtin’s

attitude to poetry is itself a dialogical one, between Bakhtin and poetry (73). Poetry

offers the possibility of what Bakhtin calls a “hidden polemic” (Speech Genres 34),

through an allegorising poetic discourse which challenges Bakhtin’s notion that

heteroglossia is sourced through prosaic rather than poetic utterance.

120 Bakhtin argues that the body, particularly grotesque or realistic depictions

of it, is a celebration of the cycle of life. The grotesque body is a comic figure of

profound ambivalence, its positive meaning linked to birth and renewal and its

negative meaning linked to death and decay. In Rabelais and His World, his study of

Gargantua, Bakhtin stresses that in medieval epochs "it was appropriate to ridicule

authority figures to use excrement to degrade” (189), and this was not to just mock,

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but to unleash what Bakhtin saw as the people’s power to renew and regenerate the

entire social system. It was the power of the people’s festive-carnival, a way to turn

the official spectacle inside-out and upside down, just for a while; long enough to

make an impression on the participating official stratum. With the advent of

modernity, the mechanistic overtook the organic, and officialdom no longer came to

join in festival-carnival. The bodily lower stratum of humour was thus separated and

alienated from the upper stratum. In Ruby as in Gargantua, I seek to undermine this

separation, and the carnivalesque signifies a literary mode that subverts and liberates

the assumptions of dominant styles or forms through a kind of playful chaos.

121 In her essay “Bodymatters” (1989), Ann Jefferson argues that Bakhtin’s

notion of the body is best understood as a gift, as an act of aesthetic altruism on the

part of the writer. By engaging with the body, I am engaging in an act of gathering. I

am attempting to gather together some of the parts of the body the reader is unable to

see – the reader’s head, face, facial expression. Focusing on Bakhtin’s early essay

“Author and Hero in Aesthetic activity” (1920), Jefferson also highlights “Bakhtin’s

repeated emphasis on the author’s “outsidedness” (his necessary otherness)” as a

result of this act of gathering and giving (38). I would argue that the outsider, the

Ashik if you will, is thus conceived from notions of the body just as much as he is

from the geo-cultural contexts. In keeping with traditional notions of the Ashik, the

lyric lies at the heart of this conception, as this self-imposed alienation is an act of

love, a selfless act of affection and giving. As Bakhtin puts it, “love is the

culmination of the aesthetic, the necessary condition – only love can be aesthetically

productive” (Dialogic 123).

122 A reference to a collection of poems by Iranian poet Simin Behbahani,

entitled The Lute is Broken (1951), which laments the decline of traditional Iranian

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culture in the face of rapid modernisation and westernisation. I argue here that the

breaking of the lute is a beginning rather than an end, an opportunity for new kinds

of sounds, melodies and lyrics. As I say in the previous line, “the world rolls on” and

we learn from its “new colours.”

123 At this point, I use the sound effect to reassert the importance of the velar

fricative in the English language and as a consequence create a new link with the

Persian language. There is a crescendo of guttural noise that ends up sounding like

radio interference, which is reflected in the next line. I give reassurance that this is

“the right frequency” both in terms of finding the signal that creates East and West,

but also that the rhythm of Ruby remains truthful and pertinent, that it achieves the

“nishapour blues.”

124 Esfand is an herbaceous plant found almost exclusively in the Middle East

and Central Asia. Zoroastrian folk practices reflect a classical belief in the medical

properties of esfand, while attributing a number of mystical properties to it. It is

considered to be a divinely favoured plant, which can cure seventy-two varieties of

ailments the most severe of which is leprosy. The smoke from its burning seeds is

believed to ward off harm from persons or places that are exposed to its effects.

Esfand is burned at potentially harmful moments such as during circumcision

ceremonies or for the protection of a woman in childbirth. The burning of the seeds

is accompanied by the recitation of a chant. Esfand is also occasionally encountered

in Iranian folk medicine. For example, the practice of burning esfand seeds to avert

the evil eye is widely attested in early classical Persian literature. The association of

esfand with haoma (the sacred beverage of Zoroastrianism) may have influenced this

practice. The continuity of Persian tradition has brought the ancient sacred plant into

Islamic sources. An Islamic tradition states that there is an angel in each of the plant's

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leaves and seeds. The apotropaic value of esfand is reflected in its burning against

evil presence. In a ceremony to counteract effects of evil upon a child, the burning of

esfand is required. Esfand seeds were also used to produce an invisible ink. The

process involved pounding the seeds before soaking them in water for two days. The

juice thereafter functioned as an invisible ink when written on paper. In order to read

it, the paper is brought close to a flame and the heat makes the writing visible. See

the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on esfand for a more detailed discussion of esfand

and associated cultural phenomena.

125 This line is taken from the Basil Bunting ode “Nothing” in The Collected

Poems of Basil Bunting (41).

126 The final full page of Ruby ends with a line, indeed the final line, of Peter

Jaeger’s poetic sequence Prop (2007). As with Ruby, the poems of Prop express the

temporary, impermanent character of perception by re-negotiating the traditional,

voice-based lyric. Stylistically, Prop is a major influence on Ruby, with Jaeger

making use of collage as well as dramatic shifts in syntax and narrative to create an

exploration of the nature of consciousness within language itself. As Chris Hamilton-

Emery observes in his web review of Prop, it is “a book written in motion, and its

quick changes in tone and imagery present the dynamism and impermanence of the

world”. It is in this impermanence that Ruby finds its purpose and place in the world.

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Chapter Four:

Forging Omar Khayyam

When Basil Bunting praises Omar Pound’s Arabic & Persian Poems for its desire to re-

engage with Middle Eastern poetry, and for its rejection of adherence to representational

accuracy, Bunting is using these acclamations as a rallying call. He points out that by

producing something that is necessarily newer and more familiar from an older text, we

are at the same time emancipating ourselves from our established prejudices and

predispositions. We can introduce Western literary and contemporary cultural allusions

that often parallel Persian and Arabic contexts found in the original works and avoid

reinforcing Orientalist pre-conceptions. We can even merge and adapt existing poems to

create new perspectives that connect Persian and English literature and language in

neoteric, provocative and playful ways. Critically, however, as Steve McCaffery and

bpNichol put it in Rational Geomancy, the translation should be a “creative endeavour

in its own right” (32). As Kent Johnson describes it in his essay “Imitation, Traduction,

Fiction, Response,” published in Jacket magazine (2008):

Any poem is the raw material for forging experiments in translation [....]

A solid, so called accurate translation may be the first step towards even

better traductions, i.e., imaginative transformations that may well extend

energies of the original, otherwise lost in more fundamentalist attempts

to carry across, as Benjamin would have it, an ‘inessential meaning’ (1).

In this respect, Ruby is my answer to Bunting’s rallying call: a (hopefully) imaginative

transformation of the original Rubaiyat, re-connecting with something older and less

familiar whilst at the same time forging new experiments in translation.

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 One immediate implication of this kind of “imaginative transformation” is that

the “conventional” link between the original and new texts, the transfer of meaning is

lost. Rather than seeking representational fidelity, Ruby is therefore partly reliant on an

assertion of a deeper, spiritual connection between cultural traditions through the

sharing of rhythmic sounds. This process of sharing sounds operates in relation to

patterns of breathing and its articulation on the page through line-breaks. Reflecting

some of the poetics of Charles Olson as he describes them in Projective Verse, I ensure

that Ruby works on the level of sound as well as meaning, and that its lines are breath-

conditioned. In an interview for The Poetry Foundation webpage on Olson, Robert

Creeley argues that “what [Olson] is trying to say is that the heart is the basis not only

of rhythm, but it is the base measure of rhythms for all men ... when he says ‘the heart

by way of the breath to the line’ he is trying to say that it is in the line that basic

rhythmic scoring takes place.” These “rhythms for all” universalise the verse in Ruby

because once we strip away the representational meanings of English, Persian and

Arabic – we all breathe in the same way. In this stanza towards the end of Part Three, I

stop in the line halfway through phrases and even cut through a word, in order to

emphasise the importance of the underlying breath:

listen

to where the breath sto

we fill it with shards

hardened . candied

an old jug is a (66).

As Olson puts it, ‘it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born.

But the syllable is only the first child of verse […] The other child is the LINE […] And

the line comes (I swear it) from the breath’ (2). I would argue, however, that the

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interruptive nature of Ruby suggests that there is a third child in verse – a disruptive

toddler at play within the line: “we . break . many . times . between . places and times”

(73). I use this ‘broken’ style and unexpected language to unlock the original text from

shackles of translational fidelity. As I have discussed already, the ‘diminished I’ is

central to my translation, as is my resolute determination to disrupt and defamiliarise

through the language, sounds and rhythms of Ruby. Ultimately my goal is to expose the

“fragments . make it easier . to see / the past . betweens us” (98).

The second implication of this notion of “imaginative transformation” concerns

this same treatment of space and time. In Projective Verse, Olson rejects conventional

linear approaches to space and time. He describes a collapse of space and time to a

single point, a one dimensional focal point of energy or punctum, from which the

process of writing a poem can begin.a As Michael Kindellan described it in his

discussion of literalism at the Olson International Conference at the University of Kent

(2010), Olson promotes the manifestation of space-time, the atomic reduction of it, to

“dig one thing or place” (2). I would argue that creative translation is just as relevant for

this process as any other creative act. As with Benjamin's portrayal of The Task of the

Translator, creative translation cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a

transition, but in which time stands still and has to come to a stop (14). b As Omar

Pound points out in an interview in the online magazine Artful Dodge in 2002, for

poetry to exist at all, it needs to activate the existing cultural landscape, rather like light

stimulating a photoelectric cell:

I suppose what I really want to say is that great poetry must have great

vision. Whether you like the vision or not has nothing to do with it.

Poetry is like photoelectric cells that only function when they're aimed

towards the light. If you think of a poem as being a photoelectric cell,

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 reporting most vigorously when directed on a journey towards the light

you know you're not going to get much reaction if you point it down a

well.

In Ruby, I take this focus on the “smallest particle of all” one step further by giving it a

distinctive notation, a symbol that I call the “punctum.” Roland Barthes uses the term

“punctum” in his book Camera Lucida (1980) specifically in terms of emotional effects

of certain photographs. Barthes develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum:

studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph,

punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which may potentially make

the viewer take notice or pause, and establishes a direct relationship with the object or

person within the photograph (38). c In Ruby, I re-apply the principles of Barthes’ notion

to my own poetics – the moment of intense connection through detail is transferred to

pauses between words of emotional significance. I give the punctum a specific notation

through the use of a dot placed equidistantly between words – a controlled but pregnant

pause. This offers a focal point, a return to nothing, from which I build a revitalised

something new. The punctum appears throughout Ruby from the first line of the first

rubai onwards: “awake . midday” (31). The punctum acts as an off-key underscore to

Ruby, a potential antidote to excessive musicality or an over-romanticisation of lyrical

poetry. In other words the lyric is diminished or deliberately weakened by the punctum

– without them there would be less space and time for the defamiliarisation that helps

Ruby rid itself of Orientalist pretensions.

Another consequence of removing original meanings from Ruby is the more

overt manifestation of the notion of translation as “the body.” In re-interpreted texts that

have had their representational meaning deliberately stripped from them, the writing is

in one sense naked, at least in the sphere of translation. In its nakedness, the material

185
body of the source text is more apparent, inner workings more open to poetic

interpretation. For men like Omar Khayyam, such analogies would not have seemed

strange; Khayyam himself wrote a number of treatises on astronomy, algebra and

anatomy.d Khayyam’s philosophical writing makes strong parallels between the

physical body and the spiritual and poetic body. It is easy to see many of his works as a

poetic embodiment, an existential presence, even as a being in its own right. Khayyam,

for instance, talks of the life and death of the poem, and in common with Samarqandi

wrote eulogies to poetic texts as though they were old friends with distinct physical and

emotional characteristics.e This kind of re-imagining of the poem as a corporeal entity

echoes the Olsonian concept of “Proprioception.” In his essay of the same name (1965),

Olson promotes the notion of proprioception, which can be defined as perception of the

body, its parts in relation to its whole, and its placement in space (2). Indeed Olson is

interested in the fingertips in relation to the soul within. For instance, he wonders in

“Human Universe” whether “the fingertips are not very knowing knots in their own

rights, like little brains, like photo-electric cells” (159). Ultimately, Ruby, as an act of

translation, is a full exposition of a bodily link that spans both the inner and outer world.

On the one hand, there is the soul, the brain, the inner things, and on the other there is

the skin, the ever-changing outer reality, that seeks to express the complexities of that

inner soul. In all this, as the translator, I am the fingertips, and like Olson’s photo-

electric cells, I seek to illuminate some aspect or other of the original text:

naked bodies . to finger tips

inside and outside

writing . moving

having writ

move on (33)

186
 Taking a cue from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the body in Ruby is not

the external tool of an inner sovereign mental ego, but an organism within which the

ego, or mind, plays a subordinate role. I also assert that this body connects with a super-

organism, a single connecting entity, “the uni verse” (76), through which we can

understand our place in the world. Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World that the

body, particularly grotesque or realistic depictions of it such as in Rabelais’ Gargantua,

is a celebration of the cycle of life: the grotesque body is a comic figure of profound

ambivalence: its positive meaning is linked to birth and renewal and its negative

meaning is linked to death and decay (357). In Ruby, as in Gargantua, the carnivalesque

signifies a break with fixed and prescribed poetic narratives:

carnivals end it

up in the clouds they sigh

we are all people

no special story

just you and wine and

our bodies (126)

My rejection of the desire for a single narrative liberates the poetry: the body can

breathe, constantly being revived by the reader’s own perceptions and experiences. The

assumptions of dominant styles or forms are subverted and rendered powerless by

applying a playful but well-meaning sort of chaos, which means we have as I mention a

little earlier in Ruby “nowhere to go and a lifetime to re-invent” (98).

Perhaps the most significant re-invention in Ruby is of Omar Khayyam himself. I

forge him, both in the sense of constructing him and falsifying him, as a modern-day

Ashik, a twenty-first century troubadour. The Omar Khayyam of Ruby is a nomad,

travelling minstrel or fool, an outsider existing on the fringes of the political and

187
cultural establishment. He operates beyond the jurisdiction of the laws of the

mainstream, beyond even its linguistic rules. He is brave enough to travel into the

lawless territories between linguistic and literary traditions and through his folly he

offers the reader access to other worlds:

but we’re still bounderied

what he comes from

is words to

make us

new (49)

In "Unsealing ('the old new language')" (1988) Derrida argues that writers are entitled to

“invent, break new paths” by journeying along old ones, even if their meanings are

unreliable or manufactured (Points 17). This is why I end Ruby in the way I do, with a

single line that says how Ruby came to be what it is – that it is “forged old and new . for

ruby . for you” (127).

NOTES

a
Ian Davidson also reflects on this relationship between space and time in

poetry. In Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry Davidson focuses in particular on the

way the form and content of modern and contemporary poetry have engaged with the

process of globalisation and with theories of space and specialisation. In “Space, Place

and Identity,” he examines the way in which spatial theory can support new readings of

relationships between poetry and identity, as the movement of people around the world

188
increases and communities become increasingly diverse (Ideas of Space 89-121). Ruby

is in a sense an example of this expansion in movement and diversity, and echoes my

own notion of the poet-translator as a modern-day Ashik, building bridges between

poetic identities.
b
For more on the implications of Benjamin’s “The Task of The Translator” on

this topic, see the essay “Translation as Simulacrum” by John Johnston in Rethinking

translation: discourse, subjectivity, ideology (1992).

c
Strictly speaking Barthes’ punctum is unintentional. As Michael Fried points

out in his essay “Barthes’ Punctum” in Critical Enquiry (2005), the experience of the

punctum lives or dies for Barthes according to the absence or presence of intentionality

on the part of the photographer or viewer; if there is visible intention, there is no

punctum (38). That the punctum can exist only in the absence of intention is consistent,

Fried claims, with his distinction between “seeing” and “being shown.” Yet Fried also

points out that the punctum is above all else “anti-theatrical” in the sense that we see it

for ourselves without any meaning being deliberately assigned to it. This later

characteristic is also true of my punctum: the space it occupies is a void – an

understated haven between the more theatrical sounds and rhythms that sit either side of

it.
d
See Razavi (18-39), for the connections between the different strands in

Khayyam’s intellectual activity including his philosophical treatises.

e
Ibid., (34-35), for a more detailed discussion on Khayyam’s eulogic poetry.

189
Appendix

Ruby vs. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Table of Comparison

In the table below, the rubais of Ruby are shown in order of appearance in this volume.

They are compared with the quatrains of FitzGerald’s first edition of The Rubaiyat,

and the Whinfield translation, both of which I use as key points of reference in my

work; see note 10 (134). I have also included references to the Persian manuscripts in

which each rubai appears, as a fifth column in the table. I use the collected Winfield

Edition of these manuscripts as my source text for the original Persian language

poems. For a more detailed explanation of the variations by manuscript, see Jos

Couman’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: An Updated Bibliography (29-33).

The final column of the table indicates the specific Persian manuscripts in

which the poems appear an abbreviated code:

A is the Asiatic Society Manuscript, found in Bengal by Edward Cowell.

B is the Bodleian Library Manuscript, aka the Ouseley Manuscript.

C is the Calcutta Manuscript, also found by Cowell, in the city of that name.

H is the Haft Iqlam, written by Amin Ahmad Razi, which contains several

quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam.

I is the India Office Manuscript No. 2420.

J is the India Office Manuscript No. 2486.

L is the Lucknow Manuscript, discovered in 1878.

M is the Marsad ul ‘Ibad, written by Najmu-d-Din Abu Bakri Razi, which

contains several quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam.

N is the manuscript used by French translator Jean Baptiste Nicolas.

190
Ruby FitzGerald Whinfield Persian Manuscripts

1 1 233 ACIJL
2 49 336 BLN
3 57 310 ACNI
4 40 221 ACIL
5 58 52 ACILN
6 27 376 ACILN
7 91 318 ACIJLN
8 56 216 BL
9 n/a 508 M
10 3 81 N
11 84 377 LN
12 109 257 BLN
13 81 408 ABCILN
14 113 7 ABCIJLN
15 67 386 BL
16 6 119 ACIJL
17 70 258 ACIJLN
18 29 264 ACIJLN
19 37 20 LN
20 74 114 BL
21 108 217 ABCIJL
22 31 26 ACIJLN
23 33 303 ACIJL
24 50 254 ACIJL
25 99 330 ABCIJLN
26 114 234 B
27 28 151 ACILN
28 26 341 LN
29 41 386 BL
30 18 70 ACIJLN
31 2 1 ACIJLN
32 78 401 ACIJL
33 83 87 ACILN
34 86 339 LN
35 15 298 ACIJLN
36 7 425 ACIJL
37 8 134 ABCIJLN
38 10 455 ACIJLN
39 n/a 507 B
40 98 193 ACIJHLN
41 22 396 ABCIJLN
42 23 312 ACIJLN
43 19 72 ACIJLN
44 20 277 ACLN

191
Ruby Fitzgerald Whinfield Persian Manuscripts

45 107 155 ACILN

46 111 240 ACIJLN
47 82 489 ABCIL
48 12 79 BN
49 112 379 ACIJLN
50 4 116 B
51 43 44 ACIJLN
52 46 304 ABCIJLN
53 87 265 LN
54 47 86 LN
55 44 237 ACIL
56 39 252 ABCIJLN
57 38 32 ABCIJLN
58 48 196 ACIN
59 101 6 ACIJLN
60 13 108 ABCIJL
61 96 42 ABCIJN
62 100 218 B
63 104 332 BLN
64 n/a 197 ABCHILN
65 106 208 ABCILN
66 64 247 N
67 34 47 ABCIJLN
68 30 133 LN
69 45 242 ACIJLN
70 79 35 ABCIJLN
71 80 4 ACIJLN
72 n/a 369 LN
73 88 398 LN
74 105 165 ABCILN
75 55 67 ACIJLN
76 51 194 ACIJLN
77 25 73 ACIJLN
78 110 342 LN
79 24 219 ACIL
80 21 104 ABL
81 89 102 N
82 17 175 ABCIJLN
83 60 161 N
84 90 100 ACILN
85 14 411 BLN
86 65 475 ACIJLN
87 59 254 ACIJL
88 71 209 ACIJLN

192
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