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The Rubáiyát: A Labour of Love

The Rubáiyát: A Labour of Love. Reza Taher-Kermani.
Victoriographies, 7 (2017) 1, pp. 76-80.

This is an essay on the genesis of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The contention is that the Rubáiyát ensued, at least, partly from the affection that Edward FitzGerald had for his friend and mentor in Persian, Edward Byles Cowell. FitzGerald used Omar Khayyám as an excuse to stay in touch with his dear friend Cowell, who left England after introducing him to Khayyám and his poetry. But FitzGerald soon fell in love with ‘Omar’, his new Persian mentor, and replaced the love that he had for Cowell with the one he developed for ‘Omar’. The result of this love was the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

The discovery of the Rubáiyát

The discovery of the Rubáiyát. Robert Bernard Martin.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 77-95.
(From With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward FitzGerald, 1985.)

Martin considers the death of Fitzgerald’s great friend, William Browne, as the significant event which shaped the author’s life. The consensus to explain the Rubaiyat’s success is that “the times were ripe” for works repudiating the traditional religious morality and attempting to find an alternative to it. It is indeed startling to realise that the date of the Rubaiyat’s first appearance, 1859, coincides with that of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: ‘a Thing must live’

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: ‘a Thing must live’. Matthew Reynolds.
In: Reynolds (Ed.) 2011 – The poetry of translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Summary

In Pope, contrasting metaphors collaborated as guides to his translation; in Pound, an explicit metaphor of translation is, in practice, haunted by its opposite. FitzGerald associated various metaphors with his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: friendship with Omar, preservation of the ‘Oriental Idiom’ and: ‘at all Cost, a Thing must live.. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle’. This last is the most inward with his practice as it is nourished by reflections in the original Persian as to how life might continue into different creatures, or even somehow persist in inanimate matter. Yet such ‘life’ is radically ambiguous: the Rubáiyát is a questioning text in which the categories that usually discipline translation dissolve—as do my own categories of metaphorical explanation.

Omar the Wise

Omar the Wise
In: World of wonder, 1973, nr. 165, p. 14-15

Over the centuries, from far-away Persia, come the sad, sweet words of wisdom of that land’s most famous bard.

FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam

FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam. Patrick Pointon.
Contemporary Review 78 (1950), p. 99-102.

General article about FitzGerald, his life, his friends and his letters and the story of the Rubáiyát

With friends possessed – a life of Edward FitzGerald

With friends possessed – a life of Edward FitzGerald. Robert Bernard Martin. London, Faber and Faber, 1985. 313 p. ISBN: 0571134629.

Summary:

Biography of Edward FitzGerald, describing him as an attractive, brilliant, eccentric, irrepressibly humorous, loving and deeply vulnerable person.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword
I Family and Childhood
II Cambridge
III Thackeray, Tennyson, and Browne
IV Mirehouse and Boulge Cottage
V Browne’s Marriage
VI Cowell and Barton
VII Euphranor
VIII Death of FitzGerald’s Parents
IX FitzGerald’s Marriage
X The Discovery of the Rubáiyát
XI Posh
XII Letters and Readers
XIII Settling Accounts
XIV Boulge Churchyard
Acknowledgements
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index