omar khayyam rubaiyat fitzgerald translation

A complete English translation of the title, therefore, would be Omar Kayyam's Quatrains. His chosen form was a four line stanza called the ruba'i, which means 'foursome' in Perrsian. Then, because of political unrest and personal spite, he lost favour and retired to write bitter-sweet verses about the consolations of wine, companionship, and the fleetingness of time. As a mathematician he used geometry to solve cubic equations, and also worked on Euclid's Fifth Postulate. In 1074 he helped reform the Persian Calendar, though this has been disputed. He was a follower of the Persian philosopher Avicenna who was, in turn, a disciple of Aristotle and Greek science. Omar Khayyam (Khayyam means tentmaker, presumably his father's trade) became one of the foremost mathematicians and astronomers of his day. Being open to trade also meant being open to conquest and, eight years before he was born, the province was over run by Turkman invaders, zealous recent converts to Islam who held the territory under the authority of the Caliph of Baghdad. His province, Khorassan, was prosperous, being both fertile and on the China-Mediterranean trade route. He was born in Naishapur, a city about two hundred and fifty miles from present day Teheran, and not too far south of the River Oxus.

Omar Khayyam's story has its variants but is roughly agreed. Who was Khayyam? He was a real man, a mathematician who lived in north eastern Persia between 10 (or '26). Cowell had also introduced him to Spanish, enabling to get his translating hand in on the plays of Calderon and two other Persian poems before tackling Omar. (The work took his mind off things.) When he was translating the poem between 1857 and '59 Cowell was in India, connected by an efficient Victorian postal service. Even then FitzGerald, who was congenitally idle, might have done nothing if he hadn't undergone what, for him, was a decade of stress in the 1850s. (FitzGerald was no linguist.) It was by chance also that Cowell discovered an Omar Khayyam manuscript in the Bodleian (FitzGerald had tried to stop him going to Oxford).

It was by chance that he met Edward Cowell, one of the few Victorians who spoke Persian, and who was friendly enough to help him. We're lucky to have FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at all.

Omar khayyam rubaiyat fitzgerald translation