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Translation or travesty?

Translation or travesty? an enquiry into Robert Graves’s version of some Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. John Charles Edward Bowen. Abingdon, Abbey Press (Berks), 1973. Freshet library, no. 2. IX, 43 p. ISBN: 0900012323.

Summary:
Bowen discusses whether Edward FitzGerald’s (1859) or Robert Graves’s (1967) version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is a more accurate translation; it explains the scope of the great Islamic philosophy of Sufism, and questions whether a mystical interpretation of the quatrains accords with Khayyam’s known scepticism; and it quotes conclusive evidence that Robert Graves’s version of the Rubaiyat, so far from having been translated from a manuscript which has lain bidden in the Hindu Kush for the past 800 years, is based on the text of a book published in London in 1899.

Omar Khayyam – a myth?

Omar Khayyam – a myth? A.H. Millar
In: The Morning Post, december 2 1926.

Millar’s aim is to expose Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat as a myth.

Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam. Beveridge, H. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (1905) (July), pp. 521–526.

As is well known, the authors of the earlier Persian “anthologies do not give specimens of Omar Khayyam’s poetry. In fact, they did not regard him as a poet, but as a hakim, or philosopher, who occasionally wrote verses, and perhaps this view is more correct than the ordinary European one, and the estimate which Omar himself would have made. Poetry with him was the amusement of his leisure hours, and we might style his quatrains, in the words used by Palgrave about Bacon’s stanzas, as “a fine example of a peculiar class of poetry—that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little.”

Yet more light on Umar-i-Khayyam

Yet more light on Umar-i-Khayyam. Browne, E.G. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (1899), pp. 409-420

“As Mr. Beverldge has referred to my criticism (which is in reality not mine, but Professor A. Müller’s, cited by Professor Houtsma in a footnote on pp. xiv-xv of his edition of al-Bundárí’s History of the Seljúqs) on the now familiar story of ‘Umar’s covenant with the Nidhámu’l-Mulk and Hasan-i-Sabbah, I should be glad to have an opportunity of stating that my recent reading has shown me that this tale at least reposes on more ancient and respectable authority than either the Rawdatu-s-Safá or the Táríkh-i-Alfí, namely, on that of the Jámi’ú’t-Tawáríkh of Rashídu’d-Dín, who was put to death in a.h. 718.”