The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. A new translation from the Persian based on the edition of Mahmud Yerbudaki with a historical epilogue by Juan Cole. London ; New York [etc.] : I.B. Tauris, 2020. – viii, 164 p.; 21 x 13 cm. – ISBN: 978-0-7556-0052-6.
157 quatrains
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Muslim secularism. Juan Cole
Studies in People’s History 3 (2016) 2, pp. 138-150.
The fact that quatrains known as Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam were not really composed by the twelfth century astronomer of that name, but composed by various hands and made into collections later, is widely accepted. This paper examines under what political and social atmosphere in later times, the collections began to be compiled, and what elements of scepticism, irreligion, mysticism and even rationalism entered into them. It is argued that the collections retained their popularity and freely circulated wherever Persian was cultivated down to modern times.
Rescuing Omar Khayyam from the Victorians. J. Cole.
Michigan Quarterly Review, 52 (2013) 2, pp. 169-173.
The Rubaiyat or quatrains attributed to the mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. circa 1126) of Nishapur were made famous by the loose rendering of Edward Fitzgerald, first published in 1859. Specialists in Persian literature now agonize over how many, if any, of these poems were actually written by Khayyam. For a century after his death he was not renowned as a poet, even to those who knew him and wrote about him. Slightly later sources occasionally attribute one or two, or some as many as thirteen, Persian quatrains to the scientist. The oldest substantial book of them giving him as the author is a 1460 manuscript from Shiraz now held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (this was a principal source for Fitzgerald). Obviously it is very late, and eighty-two of the poems in it also appear in the divans or poetry collections of other authors.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Rachel Martin Cole.
Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 34 (2008), nr. 2, p. 40-41, 93.
Edward FitzGerald’s English translation of The Rubaiyat, a twelfth-century book of Persian poetry, sparked a sensation among nineteenth-century publishers and readers. His work, entitled The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, possesses a dream like quality, rich imagery, and appealing beauty that are attested to by the publication of hundreds of editions between 1859 and the present. From his first translation of the Rubaiyat to his death in 1883, FitzGerald completed five versions of the text. The Persian original comprised a collection of over one thousand quatrains, and FitzGerald felt free to transform the work in his own way, rearranging the verses and taking liberties with language. The result was a product that was less a reflection of its medieval Persian origins than the tastes of its nineteenth-century American audiences.