[Vwoolf] FIRMLY choosing a copy text

[Stuart N. Clarke]

*Very* many years ago, I  took out of a public library A. J. Arberry’s “The Romance of the Rubáiyát” (1959) and copied out into two school exercise books all the stanzas that appeared in the first edition (1859) with their variations in the subsequent editions (1868, 1872), plus some of the additional stanzas that appeared in later editions.  It is all very carefully done – and very confusing.  But, then, the three editions of the poem are very confusing when you try to compare them: stanzas dropped, stanzas added, stanzas altered.

(No idea how or where to do Xeroxing in those days, nor how to order or find a probably out-of-print book.  Just in case you’re wondering.)

Anyway, I have always thought that every stanza equalled every other in importance.  So, I was very surprised when I ordered OUP’s World’s Classics edn (ed. Daniel Karlin) of the Rubáiyát a few years ago and discovered only the 1859 version.  I thought I would be getting all three versions.  (By the way, the paratext is huge, with the poem fighting back in larger type, two stanzas to the page and those enclosed by a fancy border.)  The later versions appear piecemeal in “Variants”.

Karlin acknowledges different opinions (such as “each edition of the work is of equal authority”):

“But I remain convinced that the first edition of the Rubáiyát is a masterpiece and that subsequent editions did little to make it better and a lot to make it worse. I hope that readers will take an interest in the revisions, but they will do so always in relation to this primary text, presented here not as one phase of a textual continuum, but as a single, and beautiful, object of attention.” (p.lvi)


Stuart
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