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FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: A Victorian Invention

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát: A Victorian Invention. Esmail Zare-Behtash. The Australian National University, 1997.

Summary:
This study was written in the belief that FitzGerald did not so much translate a poem as invent a persona based on the Persian astronomer and mathematician (but not poet) Omar Khayyám. This ‘invention’ opened two different lines of interpretation and scholarship, each forming its own idea of a ‘real’ Omar based on FitzGerald’s invention. One line sees Omar as a hedonist and nihilist; the other as a mystic or Sufi. My argument first is that the historical Omar was neither the former nor the latter; second, FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát is a ‘Victorian’ product even if the raw material of the poem belongs to the eleventh-century Persia. The Introduction tries to find a place for the Rubáiyát in the English nineteenth-century era.

The Effect of Ideology on the Form …

The Effect of Ideology on the Form and Content of Edward FitzGerald’s Translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. Mana Aleahmad.
In: LingLit Journal: Scientific Journal for Linguistics and Literature, vol. 2, nr. 2 (2021), p. 75-82.

Summary

The present study attempted to examine Edward FitzGerald’s interest in Persian poetry. Translation deals with power and authority and most of the time the ideology of source text changes in favor of the dominant ideology of target text. Victorian people‘s scornful outlook toward the East led to ideological manipulation of source texts by translators such as Fitzgerald. His strange reduction in his translations, especially in Khayyam’s Rubaiyat results in the necessity of investigating his translation from ideological point of view. Surprisingly the translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat has never been studied from ideological perspective and is unknown for many literary scholars. Victorian issues had a strong effect on FitzGerald‘s selection of some of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.