The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a collection of quatrains written in Persian, believed to be by Omar Khayyam. It has been translated into many languages, with Edward Fitzgerald’s English version being the most famous. Translations often reflect the concerns of the translator, and Fitzgerald’s version added a sense of narrative flow. The Rubaiyat was well received in the US by writers such as Mark Twain and TS Eliot.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a collection of two hundred to six hundred quatrains written in the Persian language and believed to have been written by the Persian poet/mathematician/astronomer Omar Khayyam (1048-1123). The poems consist of four lines each and are known as Rubaiyats in the Arabic language, the word meaning four. Many of the details concerning the poem and the author himself are either unknown or doubtful, but it is safe to say that some of the Rubaiyat attributed to him are authentic, many are evidently apocryphal, and still others possibly came from his pen.
Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is commonly regarded as one of the most famous sequences of poems in world literature and has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Swahili and many other languages. The English poet and writer Edward Fitzgerald’s translation is the best-known and most celebrated English-language version. Other known translations include German versions by Graf von Schack and von Bodenstedt, a celebrated French version by Franz Toussaint, and a less celebrated one by JB Nicolas. There is also an acclaimed Arabic version by Ahmed Rami.
The major translations that have come to public attention all speak not only to the brilliance of the original poet, but inevitably also to the concerns of the translator. It is for this reason that it is sometimes very difficult to discern the poet’s original feeling in the translator’s interpretation of the poem. This is well demonstrated by the publication history of the English version which went through five editions, the last of which was published posthumously and is notable for the poetic license its translator took with much of the poem, often stitching two halves together of different quatrains to shape what the translator turned out to be a more pleasant hybrid.
It is to Fitzgerald’s translation that readers of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat owe the impression of narrative flow and movement. Whereas the original Farsi version was a series of self-contained quatrains, Fitzgerald instilled a sense of narrative consequence into the poem which saw the narrative transition from the rising sun to the day’s drunken denouement.
Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was widely well received in the United States. Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot read and praised it.
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