Shaaban Robert’s Swahili Rubáiyát and Its Reckonings

Abstract

Shaaban Robert’s Swahili poem Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili (Omar Khayyam in Swahili) (1952), translated from Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (1859), provides a study in the reach and transformation of British literature of the nineteenth century and in the significance of translation within a colonial sphere. Robert (1909–1962), a major Swahili author, was employed by the colonial service for all his working life, and in terms of his receipt of FitzGerald’s poem and the very language he used, the Standard Swahili created by the British colonial state, his translation was imbricated in a colonial context. He exercised significant creative agency as translator, plumbing FitzGerald’s poem for underlying elements of Khayyám’s Persian and translating FitzGerald’s rendering of Khayyám to highlight affiliations between Khayyám and Swahili poetic tradition. At the inception of Robert’s translating of FitzGerald lay a troubling experience of dislocation that resonates with FitzGerald’s creation of his translation and the reception of that poem and that helps us understand the affective associations belonging to Omar Khayyam kwa Kiswahili. Thus, Robert nurtured the cosmopolitan connections of Swahili poetry while creating for Standard Swahili—a variety of Swahili with little poetry to call its own—a poem bearing a sense of poetic tradition.