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Omar Khayyám in movies

In a recent paper Milad Minakar, Amir Hossein Chitsazian study Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in English and Persian language feature and non-biographical movies.

A still from Queen of Desert

The aim is to expound any relationships between the film and Rubaiyat; therefore, according to the type of the applied quatrain, movie genre, plot, some categories are propounded to classify the movies in which Khayyam’s quatrains are quoted such as Transiency-Death, Transiency-Carpe Diem, Heaven and Hell, and Determinism. Indeed, these categories can be applied to the theme of the movies or a single scene in which the stanza is quoted.

Milad Minakar, Amir Hossein Chitsazian (2020). The Study of Rubaiyat attributed to Khayyam in Movies . In: CINEJ Cinema Journal, Vol. 8, nr. 2 (2020), p. 324-352
DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.271

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Recent articles

In this year’s Summer issue of American Art, there are two essays on Elihu Vedder’s Rubáiyát.
Sylvia Yount shows how the fifty-four drawings that Vedder made for the deluxe edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation —as well as the related paintings and decorative designs inspired by them—reveal Vedder’s deep engagement with the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American Aesthetic movement as both an artistic and a commercial enterprise, aimed at a wide range of viewers and consumers.

Akela Reason explores Vedder’s preoccupation with the mystery of death, a subject he returned to again and again. Death comes in many forms in Vedder’s art—from “all-devouring” sphinxes presiding over desert wastes to the fratricidal conflict of the Old Testament, and devastating medieval plagues.

Elihu Vedder’s Rubáiyát: Art and Enterprise (pp. 112-118)
Sylvia Yount
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683354
Love and Death in Elihu Vedder’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (pp. 119-125)
Akela Reason
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683355
American Art, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer 2015.

 

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Jack Kerouac’s Omar

USA On the roadMichael Skau, emeritus professor with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, recently published an article in the Journal of Popular Culture titled: “Jack Kerouac’s Rubáiyát: The Influence of Omar Khayyám” (vol. 48, No. 3, 2015).

Almost all of the Kerouac studies have ignored the influence of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát in his life and work. The Rubáiyát provides significant similarities to Kerouac’s dualistic viewpoint: “the extremes of innocent indulgence of the beautiful variety of life and bitter, or even perverse, acceptance of the desolation of mortal existence”. The author, expert in ‘Beat poetry’ (Corso, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Ginsberg) points to numerous allusions to and echoes from Khayyám’s poetry, not only in On the road but in his other novels, essays and letters as well.

In a letter to Stella Sampas, his third wife, he writes: “When I’m an old man I’ll at least have my jug of wine and a loaf of bread too”. Another example of how Kerouac looks upon life is his lament on this world “which made us, but only imperfectly, that is to say unsuited to its every barb and to most of its insuitable commandments […] I never asked to be made, and so unsuited born”. To the reader this almost immediately brings to mind the book of pots . Skau’s conclusion:

For Kerouac and FitzGerald, the intertwining of delight and sadness, of happiness and dreariness, cannot be denied. Both writers find that the approach toward life is one of bright melancholy, a mournful smile, a reminder that the rose is both flower and thorns. They cannot deny the twin poles of human experience, a “triste Plaisir” that continues to resonate with their readers.

Skau’s nice and very well readable article is an almost inescapable invitation to get back On the Road again for a new experience.