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The Art of Omar Khayyam: illustrating FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat

The Art of Omar Khayyam: illustrating FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat. Illustrated lecture given to the Iran Society on 22nd November 2007. W.H. Martin, S. Mason.
Journal of the Iran Society, 2 (2008), nr 7, p. 1-8.

The lecture is mainly concerned with the Rubaiyat and the extraordinary publishing phenomenon that is associated with it, particularly the extensive and continuing production of illustrated editions of FitzGerald’s version of the poem. In it, the authors draw extensively on their recently published book on the subject.

Editing the Rubaiyat: two case-studies and a prospectus

Editing the Rubaiyat: two case-studies and a prospectus. Daniel Karlin.
Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), nr 1, p. 87-103.

The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings of Edward FitzGerald is an enjoyably preposterous example of Edwardian bookmaking–if the latter epithet may be applied to an American product. It was published in New York, by Doubleday, Page, and Company, in seven volumes, the first in 1902 and the last in 1903; though “published” is not quite the right word for an edition which, we are told on a half-title page, “consists of twenty-five sets on Japanese paper, one hundred sets on hand-made paper.

Omar sells – American advertisements based on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, c.1910-1920

Omar sells – American advertisements based on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, c.1910-1920. Michelle Kaiserlian.
Early Popular Visual Cultur, 60 (2008), nr. 3, p. 257-269.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when modern advertising grew in response to a burgeoning consumer culture, American stores displayed products tied to the name of Omar Khayyám. Motivated by Omariana, the intense response to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that contributed to an outpouring of illustrated editions, literary parodies, musical scores and dramatic productions, advertisers found a market ripe for Omar-related consumables and ephemera.

FitzGerald and the Rubaiyat, in and out of time

FitzGerald and the Rubaiyat, in and out of time. Erik Gray.
Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), nr 1, p. 1-14.

This issue of Victorian Poetry commemorates a double anniversary: March 31, 2009 marks both the bicentennial of the birth of Edward FitzGerald and the sesquicentennial of his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which was published (give or take a few days) on the poet’s fiftieth birthday. It is quite fitting that we should celebrate this occasion and at the same time quite ironic. FitzGerald’s poem, after all, seeks to do away with commemoration, and even with time itself: it enjoins the reader to think only of today, abjuring all consideration of past and future.

Accident, orientalism, and Edward FitzGerald as translator

Accident, orientalism, and Edward FitzGerald as translator. Annmarie Drury.
Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), nr 1, p. 37-53.

In the mid 1850s, Edward FitzGerald wrote to Edward Byles Cowell, the friend who tutored him in Persian, about the two men’s efforts to translate Persian poetry. FitzGerald had decided that Persian poetry in English should seem Persian still. “I am more & more convinced of the Necessity of keeping as much as possible to the Oriental Forms, & carefully avoiding any that bring one back to Europe and the 19th Century,” he announces to Cowell, a scholar of Eastern languages who patiently redacted FitzGerald’s translations, including many stanzas of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

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.

Appendix: two early reviews of the Rubaiyat

Appendix: two early reviews of the Rubaiyat.
Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), nr 1, p. 105-125.

For many years it was thought that the earliest criticism of the Rubaiyat to appear in print was a review of the second edition, published in the North American Review in 1869, by Charles Eliot Norton. In 1960, however, an earlier review, dating from just six months after the publication of the first edition, was rediscovered in The Literary Gazette, a London weekly. (See Michael Wolff, “The Rubaiyat’s Neglected Reviewer: A Centennial Recovery,” VN 17 (1960): 4-6.)