Ruba'i

A ruba'i of Omar Khayyam in Shikasta Nastaʿlīq.

Rubāʿī (Persian: رباعی‎‎ rubāʿī)[1] is a poem, or verse of a poem, consisting of four lines. It refers specifically to a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, رباعيات rubāʿiyāt, often anglicised as rubaiyat, is used for a collection of such quatrains.[2] There are a number of possible rhyme schemes to the rubaiyat form, e.g. AABA, AAAA.[3]

In Persian verse, the ruba'i is written as a four-line (or two-couplet) poem, with a rhyme-scheme AABA or AAAA.[4][5][6]

A Pakistani author and musician, Amjad Parvez, describes the ruba'i as follows:

"basically Ruba'i belongs to Persia and its metres had been created by a non-Arab poet Abul Hassan Rodeki and that was also brought into practice by non-Arab and Urdu poets. Ruba'i (quatrain) has special metres containing 24 categories (one can say "divisions" or "branches" too). Ruba'i can only be composed in those special metres, not any other normal metre. Ruba'i consists of only four lines, its two lines called 'Sehr' (Stanza). Ruba'i's first and second line must end in rhyme (example – as behold and cold), third without rhyme, and fourth line again in the selected rhyme, but that fourth line (misra) contains high, strong and complete and deep meanings, that must be related with above three lines. In these should be addressed only one point or subject, not as like ghazals or other forms of the poetry have."[7]

This is an example of a ruba'i from Rūmī's Dīwān-i Shams:

Anwār-i Ṣalāḥ-i Dīn bar angēkhta bād
Dar dīda u jān-i ʿāshiqān rēkhta bād
Har jān ki laṭīf gasht u az luṭf guzasht
Bā khāk-i Ṣalāḥ-i Dīn dar āmēkhta bād
"May the splendors of Salahuddin be roused,
And poured into the eyes and souls of the lovers.
May every soul that has become refined and has surpassed refinement
Be mingled with the dust of Salahuddin!"[8]

Metre of the ruba'i

The usual metre of a Persian ruba'i, which is used for all four lines of the above quatrain by Rumi, is as follows:[9]

– – u u – u – u – – u u –

In the above scheme, "–" represents a long syllable, and "u" a short one. As variations of this scheme, any sequence of – u can be replaced by a single "overlong" syllable, such as gēkh, tīf, luṭf in the poem above, containing either a long vowel followed by a consonant other than "n", or a short vowel followed by two consonants. An overlong syllable can also freely be substituted for the final syllable of the line, as with bād above.

Another variation is that occasionally a sequence of two short syllables (u u) can be replaced by a single long one (–).

A third variation is to use the same metre as above, but with the eighth and ninth syllables reversed:

– – u u – – u u – – u u –

Ruba'i in English

The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Algernon Charles Swinburne, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation of Khayyam's medieval Persian verses, was the first to imitate the stanza form, which subsequently became popular and was used widely, as in the case of Robert Frost's 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".

Fitzgerald's translation became so popular by the turn of the century that hundreds of American humorists wrote parodies using the form and, to varying degrees, the content of his stanzas, including The Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam, The Rubaiyat of A Persian Kitten, The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr.

An example is the following:

"Goblet", a Ruba'i of Omar Khayyám translated by Edward FitzGerald:[10]

At dawn came a calling from the tavern
Hark drunken mad man of the cavern
Arise; let us fill with wine one more turn
Before destiny fills our cup, our urn.

In extended sequences of ruba'i stanzas, the convention is sometimes extended so that the unrhymed line of the current stanza becomes the rhyme for the following stanza.[11] The structure can be made cyclical by linking the unrhymed line of the final stanza back to the first stanza: ZZAZ.[12] These more stringent systems were not, however, used by FitzGerald in his Rubaiyat.

See also

References

  1. ↑ The Persian noun is borrowed from Arabic رباعي rubāʿī "consisting of four, quadripartite, fourfold" whose root consonants ر ب ع (r-b-ʿ) also occur in the numeral أربعة arbaʿah "four". See J.M. Cowan (ed.), The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, fourth edition, Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz, 1994.
  2. ↑ A Brief History of Persian Literature, by the Iran Chamber Society
  3. ↑ Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, 1974, p.611
  4. ↑ Introduction to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Peter Avery and John-Heath Stubbs, Penguin Classics, 1981, ISBN 0-14-044384-3, p. 9
  5. ↑ The Cambridge History of Iran, v. 4, edited by R. N. Frye, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-20093-8, pgs. 633-634
  6. ↑ Elwell-Sutton, L. P. "The Foundations of Persian Prosody and Metrics," Iran, v. 13 (1975), p. 92.
  7. ↑ Dr.Amjad Parvez (25 March 2013). "A splendid poetry collection". Daily Times. Retrieved 11 April 2014.
  8. ↑ "The Splendors of Salahuddin".
  9. ↑ L. P. Elwell-Sutton (1986), “ʿARŪŻ,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, II/6-7, pp. 670-679.
  10. ↑ The most famous translation ... 1859 by Edward J. Fitzgerald. okonlife.com
  11. ↑ Skelton, Robin (2002). The Shapes of Our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide to Verse Forms and Metres from Around the World. Spokane, WA: Eastern Washington University Press. p. 106. ISBN 0-910055-76-9.
  12. ↑ Turco, Lewis (2000). The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. p. 245. ISBN 1-58465-022-2.
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