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At 5:35 PM +0200 8/18/00, Michael Suesserott wrote:
> Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before
> I swore - but was I sober when I swore?
>
>Sorry, couldn't resist. How nice to find Khayyam quoted here.
<private message> wrote:
>OK - I will bite. I have heard the quotation before but cannot recall
>where or what the rest of it was. Could you help?
Time out for a culture break, I guess...
The quote is from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. He was an
11th-century Persian poet and mathematician. There are many different
translations. The one I like best is:
The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on;
and neither piety nor wit can remove a line of it.
A more complete translation is:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar was quite a guy for his time, as described in the Columbia
Encyclopedia below - probably was an expert Persian trader, too.
The Rubáiyát was the source of many now-famous quotations:
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!
Seems appropriate for a list about trading systems...
Bob Fulks
----
Omar Khayyam
(käm´) (KEY), fl. 11th cent., Persian poet and mathematician, b.
Nishapur. He was called Khayyam [tentmaker] probably because of his
father's occupation. The details of his life are mostly conjectural,
but he was well educated and became celebrated as the outstanding
mathematician of his time. As astronomer to Sultan Malik Shah, he was
one of a group that undertook to reform the calendar. Their work led
to the adoption of a new era, the so-called Jalalian or Seljuk era,
beginning Mar. 15, 1079. Although he wrote a number of important
mathematical studies, Omar's fame as a scientist has been greatly
eclipsed in the West by the popularity of his Rubaiyat, epigrammatic
verse quatrains. The work was little known in Europe until the freely
paraphrased English translation of them was first published by Edward
FitzGerald in 1859. This influenced all subsequent evaluations of his
poetry, even among native speakers of Persian, where FitzGerald's
translation led to a new appreciation of his output. FitzGerald
omitted many of the quatrains (which were independent and
unconnected) and rearranged them into a unity expressing his
conception of Omar's philosophy; it is, however, impossible to
establish definitely that many of the nearly 500 quatrains attributed
to Omar are really his work. The hedonism of his verse often masks
his serious reflections on metaphysical issues. The verses have been
offered in literally hundreds of editions.
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