Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was enormously, and deservedly, popular from the 1880s through to at least the 1930s. It is a strange amalgam of mediaeval Arabic and mid-Victorian English poetry, however, not really a translation and never even pretending to be an exact one. Lowell put it rather nicely:
The reality is that Fitzgerald selected verses from a collection attributed to Khayyam, translating them very freely and arranging them thematically into a kind of meditation on fate; but many of the verses were later found to have been by other writers of Khayyam’s time or later.
The details are now well known and Wikipedia’s article on the Rubaiyat is uncommonly thorough, so I will leave it at that in favour of sharing some of the artwork in old published editions we have collected over the years. Continue reading “The Rubaiyat – editions and illustrations”
