Much ado about nothing in the Rubáiyát. D. Karlin.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 115-26.
Karlin probes the metaphysical gap between FitzGerald’s idea of ‘nothing’ and Tennyson’s, tracing the antecedents of the former in an English literary tradition that includes Shakespeare, Donne, and Rochester.
Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám and the tradition of verse translation into English. D. Davis.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 1-14.
Davis places FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát within the tradition of English verse translation as it has existed since the time of Chaucer. He suggests that FitzGerald was doing something relatively unprecedented when he wrote his versions of Khayyám, and that, together with the uncertain status of the original poems within the canon of Persian poetry, this was a prime factor in his work’s extraordinary success.
‘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.”