Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Dick Sullivan.
The Victorian Webb (2014)

We’re lucky to have FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at all. It was by chance that he met Edward Cowell, one of the few Victorians who spoke Persian, and who was friendly enough to help him. (FitzGerald was no linguist.) It was by chance also that Cowell discovered an Omar Khayyam manuscript in the Bodleian (FitzGerald had tried to stop him going to Oxford).