A cautionary tale. Garry Garrard
In: Omariana , Vol. 10, Nr. 1, Summer 2010
One of the most bizarre editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to be published was drawn by an Indian Pharsee named Mera Ben Kavas Sett who, according to his publisher, became well-known as an artist and interior designer in Europe. His version was published in two formats.
Photopoetry and the Problem of Translation in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Michael Nott.
Victorian Studies, 58 (2016), 4, pp. 661-695.
In the early twentieth century, two photographers produced illustrated editions of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). This essay examines the photographs of Mabel Eardley-Wilmot and Adelaide Hanscom Leeson, and explores how the Rubáiyát, while not an Orientalist poem, prompted Orientalist responses in photography. Eardley-Wilmot and Hanscom Leeson’s photobooks are early examples of photopoetry, a neglected art form in which combinations of poems and photographs create illustrative, evocative, and symbiotic relationships between text and image. Given FitzGerald’s own interest in photographic culture and the poem’s concerns with literal and metaphorical truths, the Rubáiyát illuminates practices of understanding and translating other cultures in the Victorian period.
Khayyam, Omar ix. Illustrations of English translations of the Rubaiyat. W.H. Martin, S. Mason.
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, July 2009
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam contain some of the best-known verses in the world. The book is also one of the most frequently and widely illustrated of all literary works. The stimulus to illustrate Khayyam’s Rubaiyat came initially from outside Persia, in response to translations in the West.
Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Richard Dalby
Book and Magazine Collector (2009), nr. 314, p. 44-61.
Dalby presents a short history of the Rubáiyát and highlights the most important and best known illustrated editions, also giving prices that were realized at recent auctions. The article is illuminated with sixteen illustrations from these editions, mainly by artists from the first decades of the previous century, such as Greiffenhagen, Palmer, Robinson, Dulac, Brangwyn, Bull, Geddes and Balfour.
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.
The illustration of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát and its contribution to enduring popularity. W.H. Martin, S. Mason.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 233-248.
In this paper, the authors aim to shed more light on how it is that Edward FitzGerald’s short poem became one of the most widely illustrated books of all time. They consider the social and economic framework within which publication of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát reached its zenith and the critical role played by technical change in this important period. They examine in more detail the role of certain key actors, notably individual publishers and their illustrators, in the process of Rubáiyát publishing. And, by looking at the longer term evolution of Rubáiyát publishing through the twentieth century, they try to reach a clearer view of the importance of illustration to the enduring popularity of the poem.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Jeremy Parrott.
Book and Magazine Collector (1997) nr. 163 p. 40-52.
Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation of the poem has been issued in many collectable editions