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Omar Khayyâm

Omar Khayyâm. L.P. Elwell-Sutton.
In: Eshan Yarshater. Persian Literature. Albany : Bibliotheca Persica. [1988]. ISBN: 0887062636

Edward FitzGerald, a reader “Of Taste”, and ‘Umar Khayyám, 1809-1883

Edward FitzGerald, a reader “Of Taste”, and ‘Umar Khayyám, 1809-1883. R.W. Ferrier.
Iran 24 (1986), pp. 161-187.

Summary

Edward Fitzgerald, writing to his friend, E. B. Cowell, in March 1867 on the fickleness of posthumous reputation, remarked that a hundred years ought to elapse before memorials should be made. The centenary of his death passed on June 14th 1983 and it seems appropriate to commemorate his memory, recall his humanity and reflect on his contribution to literature. He had two principal passions in life, reading and friendship. He described himself to Frederick Tennyson in 1850 as one who pretends “to no Genius, but to Taste” and disclaimed any pretensions to be a poet, for “I cannot write poems”. As for his friends, their presence glows from his letters. These two influences, imperceptibly interweaving themselves into the fabric of his personality, were responsible for that bright short decade in the middle of his life, when his “languid energies”‘ were galvanised into literary activity of which his poetic “version” of the Rubáyyat of ‘Umar Khayyám was the fascinating and controversial climax.

Omar Khayyam in Monto: a reading of a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses

Omar Khayyam in Monto: a reading of a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Carole Brown.
Neophilologus 68 (1984) 6, pp. 623-636

Readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses have found Stephen’s disquisition on gesture and his subsequent illustration of Omar Khayyam’s bread and wine rather curious and none too lucid. Given the speaker’s state of inebriation, the time of day (or, rather, night) and the locality – both in terms of Dublin’s topography and on the Homeric level – this lack of lucidity is perhaps not surprising.

FitzGerald’s recasting of the “Rubáiyát”

FitzGerald’s recasting of the “Rubáiyát”. Parichehr Kasra.
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 130 (1980) 3, pp. 458–489

Summary

It was in 1859 when FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát was published anonymously. The masterpiece was rescued by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Whitley Stokes; yet it is difficult to say who first discovered it in Bernard Quaritch’s penny box. The discovery of this literary triumph was the beginning of an enthusiastic search for the identification of its highly gifted translator. Several men appear in this search. Among them are Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, a Harvard professor of fine arts by the name of Charles Eliot Norton, and Edward Burne-Jones, one of the Victorian painters. The identification of the translator intrigued the highly challenging task of finding the original Persian rubā’īs of Omar Khayyám which had inspired the English poet to write these beautiful English quatrains. With Cowell’s assistance, Edward Heron-Allen pointed at certain rubāis as the roots of FitzGerald’s quatrains. Several decades later, in 1959, Arberry published The Romance of the Rubáiyát, in which he showed his additional work in the same direction. However, a careful study of FitzGerald’s poem reveals that both Heron-Allen and Arberry have oversimplified the make up of the sources. To trace those elements of FitzGerald’s translation which are drawn from his general readings of other Persian literary works is nearly impossible. But a close re-examination of his quatrains shows the complexity of the use he has made of the Ouseley and Calcutta manuscripts . It is to this end that the followingp ages are devoted.

Edward Fitzgerald

Edward Fitzgerald
In: Temple Bar, 88 (1890) Jan./Apr., p. 331–344

The vogue of Omar Khayyám in America

The vogue of Omar Khayyám in America. Mukthar Ali Isani.
Comparative literature studies, 14 (1977) 3, pp. 256-273

Summary

No literary event since the birth of classic letters and art in the sixteenth century is at all comparable to the discovery and reincarnation of Omar by Fitzgerald,” declared a journal in Portland, Oregon. According to a report current in the 1890s, even a frontiersman striking a remote camp on the Great Divide was heard murmuring a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. An American was the first to review the poem and start it on its road to fame, and, in the nineteenth century, FitzGerald probably had more admirers in America than in his own country. By the turn of the century, Americans quoted the Rubaiyat from memory, called for a number of editions of British translations, brought out their own versions, publicly debated the philosophy of Omar, and copied the Persian’s manner and method either in admiration or to heap satire upon the events and personalities of their time. Some of the “Omarism” of the 1890s was a fad, but evidence of a serious and lasting American interest is now spread impressively over the span of a century.