Le Gallienne’s paraphrase and the limits of translation. A. Talib.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 175-192.
Talib shows that Richard Le Gallienne’s 1897 edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is an original work of literature that helps us understand the contemporary tensions surrounding academic and commercial translation and the place of the Rubáiyát in English literary history.
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát and agnosticism. Marta Simidchieva.
In: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Popularity and neglect. Ed. by A. Poole et al. London, Anthem Press, 2011. pp. 55-72.
The author tries to find a possible answer to Pound’s question about the success of FitzGerald’s translation. She puts the first two editions of the Rubáiyát in the intellectual context of the times, in an attempt to discover how the Persian transplants ‘correlate with the [host] system’. She contends that the poetic persona of the Persian sage, and the agnostic overlay which FitzGerald created through his choices as an editor and interpreter of the Khayyámic legacy, were as instrumental in ensuring the worldwide fame of the Rubáiyát as FitzGerald’s prowess as a translator.
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.
The Rubaiyat of Edward FitzOmar – Edward FitzGerald, translator of Omar Khayyam’s ‘The Rubaiyat’. G. Sloan.
American Atheist Magazine (2002) (Winter)
Long ago, in the Protestant hinterlands of northeast Texas, four young infidels consecrated their bibulous souls to Omar Khayyám, the eleventh-century Persian astronomer, mathematician, and poet. Each Saturday night in an old Studebaker, we made a pilgrimage to Hugo, Oklahoma, the nearest wet town, to procure libations of Ripple wine. As we meandered homeward on isolated back roads, we swilled the “old familiar juice.” Between swigs, we recited quatrains from The Rubáiyát, the bible for apostate tipplers. The mellifluous verse articulated our cosmic incertitude, alienation, and melancholy yearning. It also lent a romantic aura to inebriation.
Von der Übersetzung zur Intertextualität – Die Dokumentation fremder und eigener Texte in einer historisch-kritischen Edition. H.T.M. van Vliet.
Editio : internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft 15 (2001), p. 67-85.
Van Vliet discusses the complex relationship between original and translation, using the translations by J.H. Leopold of Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát.
Fugitive articulation of an all-obliterated tongue – Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and the politics of collecting. B.J. Black.
In: On exhibit. Victorians and their museums. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000, p. 48-66.
In a chapter on the Rubáiyát and “the politics of collecting,” Black argues that FitzGerald appropriated an oriental text in order to domesticate it.
Orientalism translated – Omar Khayyam through Persian, English and Hindi. Harish Trivedi.
In: Colonial transactions. English literature in India. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995., p. 29-52.
The Khayyam texts assembled in this essay constitute a partial but significant narrative of the formation of the modem Indian identity not only in terms of a Perso-Indian response to a Perso-Anglian poetic construct, but also in terms of the constantly shifting grounds of the linguistic basis of that response. The progress of Khayyam from Persian not initially into Hindi but into English into Hindi into English-English into Indian-English not only reflects closely the linguistic-cultural evolution of modem India from c. 1780 to 1989: it also provides a complex ‘oriëntalist’ sub-text of our colonial and post-colonial condition over this period.