According to some, Ghiyath al-Din Abul Fateh Omar Ibn Ibrahim Al-Khayyam (1048 – 1131) was a physician of some repute. He wrote four books on mathematics, one on algebra, one on geometry, three on physics, and three books on metaphysics, all of which were greatly influential throughout the middle ages. However, it is as a poet that he is most widely read and remembered almost 900 years later.

Khayyam means tentmaker, possibly his father’s occupation. Omar spent his life travelling around the centres of learning near his home town Nishapur in far north-eastern Iran. Whether he was a better mathematician or poet is a source of amused debate between literary and mathematics camps.

He is credited with developing binomial theorem and a test for specific gravity. His algebraic work on conic sections was not proved for 750 years. He also joined a panel of scholars to revise the calendar, in 1079. Khayyam and his group measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days. They were out by .000008 of a day according to modern measurements!

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a famous work of poetry in the English-speaking world thanks to a 19^th century translation by Edward Fitzgerald. A rubaiyat is a quatrain: a four line poem, and Khayyam’s were his own versions of traditional Sufi verses. Fitzgerald translated about 100 of somewhere between 600 and 1000 ascribed to Khayyam.

Read for what they appear to be, the rubaiyat reflect upon life, and conclude that it should not be wasted and that it is best tolerated with a good drink of wine:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it. (76/1868)

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,

Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. (8/1868)

Ah, fill the Cup:- what boots it to repeat

How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:

Unborn TOMMORROW, and dead YESTERDAY,

Why fret about them if TO-DAY be sweet! (37/1859)

How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit

Of This and That endeavour and dispute?
Better be merry with the fruitful grape

Than sadden after none, or bitter, fruit. (39/1859)

As with most good poetry there is something going on beneath the surface. Here is another famous Sufi poet, Masnavi of Hafiz, also inviting drunkenness:

Minstrel, bring close together the harp and drum.

With a sweet melody invite all of the lovers to come.

Strike a path that the Sufi into ecstasy goes,

Union through drunkenness will soon end his woes.

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed were not the only ones to use symbolism and allegory in religious art in the middle ages. In the sublime poetic tradition of the Sufi, wine is spirit, drunkenness the intoxication of pure worship, lovers the worshippers. No doubt this double language had its uses in courtly love!

Naturally the modern drinker is entitled to their own interpretation! As Omar himself says:

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. (27/1859)

Fitzgerald’s translations are a famous case of the difficulty of translation from one time and culture to another. His own essay on the subject is most interesting. Have a look at the introductory rubaiyat from the two sets he did, from 1859 and then 1868:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

and

Wake! For the Sun beyond yon Eastern height

Has chased the Session of the Stars from Night;

And, to the field of Heav’n ascending, strikes

The Sultan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

In allegorical terms there are great differences between the Morning and the Sun, and Night and Flight. Shaft and Noose may be sexual as well as spiritual imagery. It is an interesting exercise to try and pin down the meaning of such poems, and the psychology of their translators!

Consider: what is the most accurate language for medicine: mathematics or poetics? Numbers or metaphors?

Have you found clinical situations in which translation from one language, or type of language, to another has been difficult? Or even compromised clinical care?

Ibn Sina

Another Islamic physician-polymath of the time was Avicenna, properly called Ibn Sina. He wrote about 450 treatises, including a lengthy poem on the practice of medicine, and is one of the most famed figures in medical history.

References and further reading

Fitzgerald E (1859) (trans.) The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Smith P (1986) The Book of the Winebringer: Masnavi of Hafiz New Humanity Books

http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/khayyam/khayyam.php

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Khayyam.html

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Chronology/900_1100.html#1072

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/poetry_2.html US National Library of Medicine Islamic Medical Manuscripts

updated: 22/03/2010