"I believe I love poetry almost as much as ever: but then I have been suffered to doze all these years in the enjoyment of old childish habits and sympathies, without being called on to more active and serious duties of life. I have not put away childish things, though a man. But, at the same time, this visionary inactivity is better than the mischievous activity of so many I see about me." --Edward FitzGerald to John Allen, March 9, 1850 (1) I. The Amateur Rubaiyat Robert Graves, in promoting his own "authentic" translation of Omar Khayyam's quatrains in 1968, slandered Edward FitzGerald, the poem's Victorian translator and popularizer, as a "dilettante faggot trying to pretend he was a scholar." (2) Graves believed he had access to an earlier manuscript of the quatrains, though literary scholars soon revealed he had instead been taken in by a forgery orchestrated by the Sufi mystic Omar Ali-Shah. To make matters worse for Graves, the forged manuscript was itself cultivated from a commentary published by the Persian enthusiast Edward Heron-Alien, who in 1899 had published FitzGerald's fifth edition with, on the opposite page, "the Persian script of the ruba'i, hah-ruba'i or ruba'iyat, which he believed had inspired FitzGerald's translation" (Bowen, p. 2). Graves, not realizing how derivative of FitzGerald's work his translation indeed was, grandiloquently titled his edition, which he released with Doubleday in 1968, The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam. Yet Graves's defamation of FitzGerald is revelatory, for it suggests how the perceived shortcomings of FitzGerald's rendition, if not exclusively his character, are both amateur and homoerotic. Indeed, Graves was correct to perceive the same-sex entanglements of FitzGerald's verse, for as Dick Davis has pointed out, the cast of characters in FitzGerald's poem appears to be entirely male. (3) Before attempting the poem in English, FitzGerald had translated it first into "Monkish Latin," for which he uses masculine forms to connote the speaker's cupbearer and beloved. (4) The second-person "Thou" of FitzGerald's English versions obscures what the verses' 1867 French translator J. B. Nicolas called "revolting sensualities which I refrain from translating," and the gender of the Persian male beloved fades into second-person, English indeterminacy. (5) In response, Graves's reconstitution of "the original rubaiyyat" straightens out the queerer, ambiguous moments of FitzGerald's verse: "some once lovely Head" (st. 28) of FitzGerald's first version transforms into "some lovely girl" in Graves's hands (st. 19), and the "Angel Shape" of a cupbearer (st. 42), admittedly FitzGerald's own poetic innovation, becomes a tedious "Old man" and "fellow toper" (Graves, p. 64) (6) Graves's "original" version required a sanitization of the more homophile moments of FitzGerald's verse and rewrote its ambiguities to tally with mid-twentieth-century homophobia. The changes are regrettable, for, as Erik Gray discusses regarding popular illustrations that regendered the poem's cupbearer or beloved as female, "something crucial is lost when all of the poem's erotic charge is automatically read as heterosexual--a sense of radical questioning of the world and its assumptions" ("Common and Queer," p. 36). Yet, of course, FitzGerald did not print his Latin quatrains (though he very coyly shared them with Edward Cowell, his young married friend and Persian tutor), and he instead selected the ambiguity of a second-person address. The text's uncertainty is productive, for it opens up the poem to enjoyment from readers of multiple erotic investments. Certainly, early critics like Charles Eliot Norton, who celebrated the "manly independence" of Omar in a review that bequeathed the poem to the heirs of American transcendentalism while elevating it above literal translations, might balk at the suggestion of same-sex eroticism in the verse, and the turn-of-the-century Omar Khayyam Club likewise anticipated Graves by asserting the female sex of the cupbearer in numerous illustrations. …

中文翻译：

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精致的业余爱好者：FitzGerald、Rubáiyát 和 Queer Dilettantism

“我相信我几乎和以往一样热爱诗歌：但是这些年来，我一直在享受旧的幼稚习惯和同情中打瞌睡，没有被要求承担更积极和严肃的生活职责。我没有把抛开孩子气，虽然是一个男人。但是，与此同时，这种空想的不活动比我看到的许多关于我的淘气活动要好。” ——爱德华·菲茨杰拉德写给约翰·艾伦，1850 年 3 月 9 日 (1) I. The Amateur Rubaiyat Robert Graves 在 1968 年宣传他自己对 Omar Khayyam 绝句的“真实”翻译时，诽谤这首诗的维多利亚时代翻译家和普及者爱德华·菲茨杰拉德为一个“试图假装自己是学者的业余爱好者”。(2) 格雷夫斯相信他可以接触到早期的绝句手稿，尽管文学学者很快透露，他是被苏菲派神秘主义者奥马尔·阿里·沙阿精心策划的赝品所迷惑。让格雷夫斯更糟的是，伪造的手稿本身是根据波斯爱好者爱德华·赫伦·阿利恩 (Edward Heron-Alien) 发表的评论改编的，他于 1899 年出版了菲茨杰拉德的第五版，在对页上写着“ruba'i 的波斯文字”。 、hah-ruba'i 或 ruba'iyat，他认为这激发了菲茨杰拉德的翻译”（鲍恩，第 2 页）。格雷夫斯没有意识到他的翻译确实是 FitzGerald 作品的衍生品，他雄辩地将他的版本命名为他于 1968 年与 Doubleday 一起发行的版本，Omar Khayyam 的原始 Rubaiyyat。然而，格雷夫斯对菲茨杰拉德的诽谤具有启发性，因为它表明菲茨杰拉德的缺陷是如何被感知的 他的演绎，如果不完全是他的性格，既是业余的又是同性恋的。事实上，格雷夫斯对菲茨杰拉德诗歌中的同性纠缠的理解是正确的，因为正如迪克戴维斯所指出的那样，菲茨杰拉德诗中的角色似乎完全是男性。(3) 在尝试用英文写这首诗之前，菲茨杰拉德首先将其翻译成“僧侣拉丁语”，为此他使用男性化的形式来暗示说话者的酒政和爱人。(4) 菲茨杰拉德英文版本的第二人称“你”掩盖了该诗句 1867 年法国翻译家 JB Nicolas 所说的“令人反感的淫荡，我拒绝翻译”，而波斯男性心爱的性别逐渐变成第二人称，英语不确定性。(5) 作为回应，格雷夫斯重构了“ 世纪之交的 Omar Khayyam 俱乐部同样通过在众多插图中断言酒政的女性来预测格雷夫斯。…