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#5 – The Gains and Losses of Misinterpretation
by Tristan Latchford
Date added: 26/06/2024
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald), Quatrain 29
The entire of Fitzgerald’s famous translation of the poem can be found on scared-texts.com. I’m now exceedingly glad I read Allen’s translation first, as Fitzgerald’s flies so far from the original as to become entirely original in itself. The above quatrain by Fitzgerald (29), appears to have no analogue at all, whereas other quatrains have some similarities.
'Already on the Day of Creation beyond the heavens my soul
Searched for the tablet and pen and for Heaven and Hell;
At last the Teacher said to me with His enlightened judgement,
“Tablet and Pen, and Heaven and Hell are within thyself.”
The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrain 15
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And after many days my Soul return’d
And said, “Behold, Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”
The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, (Fitzgerald), Quatrain 53
This is an extraordinarily exciting example of misinterpretation becoming a creative force. We often speak of misinterpretation as a process where there is only a sense of some form of loss – we aim for exactness, to be comprehended and clearly understood. Yet here, Fitzgerald’s ‘translation’ is very much a case of misinterpretation creating something that is beautiful, and insightful in its own right.
What other cases are there of misinterpretation creating? And how much do we lose by considering misinterpretation as a purely loss-leading function. Could there be gains from misinterpretation, and if there can, are there other things like misinterpretation that we consider to be negative within the culture that can have profoundly creative outcomes. Indeed, a classic example of this in Academic circles is the story of the hung-over undergraduate student studying mathematics who copied down the equation from a board as homework, stayed up all night working hard on what appeared to be an extremely difficult solution, and returned to his lecturer to discover that it had been written down as an example of an unsolvable equation to which he had found a novel solution. Sometimes it’s better not to know exactly what is going on in order to get a remarkable result.
I have settled on writing the quartet based on the first quatrain listed in this article (29, Fitzgerald). Structurally, I’m building the piece as a series of formal ‘mirrors’ that are derived from a single Cantus Firmus, which is then ornamented continuously. The hope is that this will create the sense of evermore being produced by the same melody as first I sang, within the context of a highly academic construction, and with specific reference to my younger palindromic pieces such as ‘Rain’ (Op.6). I’m very much looking forward to sharing the fruits of this at the highSCORE festival next month.
