Accident, orientalism, and Edward FitzGerald as translator. Annmarie Drury.
Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), nr 1, p. 37-53.

In the mid 1850s, Edward FitzGerald wrote to Edward Byles Cowell, the friend who tutored him in Persian, about the two men’s efforts to translate Persian poetry. FitzGerald had decided that Persian poetry in English should seem Persian still. “I am more & more convinced of the Necessity of keeping as much as possible to the Oriental Forms, & carefully avoiding any that bring one back to Europe and the 19th Century,” he announces to Cowell, a scholar of Eastern languages who patiently redacted FitzGerald’s translations, including many stanzas of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.