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.