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Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát

Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Erik Gray.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 209-226.
(From SEL 41 (2001), nr. 4 (Autumn), p. 765-793.)

Gray argues that critics seem to have taken Fitzgerald at his word, who constantly advises in the Rubaiyat to ‘forget’. After a brief discussion of Tennyson’s poetry (also very concerned with the question of memory), Gray moves to examine the formal means Fitzgerald uses to efface his poem from the reader’s memory. Considering the poem’s publication history, the author suggests that “readers have never forgotten the Rubaiyat paradoxically because they are unable to remember it precisely”. “The poem is forgetful, or at least absent-minded, at every level: the rendition of the Persian, the rhymes, the quatrains, the different editions – all simultaneously recollect and efface dead selves.”

Common and queer: syntax and sexuality in the Rubáiyát

Common and queer: syntax and sexuality in the Rubáiyát. Erik Gray.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and Neglect. Cambridge, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 27–44.

Gray contends that FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát originally achieved its giddy popularity because it seemed so strange and daring, yet the poem’s very familiarity has tended to obscure what is most exceptional about it, its often puzzling language and its depiction of relations between men.

‘Let the Credit Go’: Coleridge, Edward FitzGerald, and Literary Custody

‘Let the Credit Go’: Coleridge, Edward FitzGerald, and Literary Custody. Erik Gray.
Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge (1999) (Autumn), p. 47-52.

Edward FitzGerald seems to have been thinking of Coleridge while translating the Rubáiyát. In a letter of May, 1857, about a year after he had been introduced to the poem, FitzGerald gives the first evidence that he has been translating it into verse. Only a single quatrain is translated, and that not into English, but into Latin; FitzGerald writes, “I could not help running into such bad Latin,” which, he says, “is to be read as Monkish Latin.”