Archives

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.

Edward FitzGerald. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition

Edward FitzGerald. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition. Edited by Christopher Decker. Charlotteville ; London, University Press of Virginia, 1997. lxxii, 258 p. (Victorian Literature and Culture Series). ISBN: 0813916895.

Summary:
In this critical edition all extent states of FitzGerald’s versions of the translation are published for the first time, providing a full record of its complicated textual evoluation. Decker illuminated the complex process of revision by providing a textual appendix in which a comparative printing lays down each stratum of the composition.

Contents

Acknowledgements p. ix
Abbreviations p. xi
Introduction p. xiii
Textual note p. xlix
Emendations p. lxii
Select bibliography p. lxix
Critical text of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
1859 p. 1
1868 p. 25
1872 p. 57
1879 p. 87
Appendix I. Comparative texts, with a table of the sequences of quatrains in the Rubáiyát p. 117
Appendix 2. FitzGerald’s Latin translation p. 233
Appendix 3. The pronunciation of Persian words in the Rubáiyát p. 238
Appendix 4. Select glossary p. 250
Index p. 255

Lost on the Titanic

Lost on the Titanic. Rob Shepherd. London : Shepherds Sangorski & Sutcliffe and Zaehnsdorf, 2001. ix, 60 p. ISBN: 9780954107208.

Summary:
Book focusing on the unique binding that the firm had produced for a copy of Omar Khayam’s Rubáʻí̄yát which had been on the Titanic when it sunk in 1912.
“Published in 2001 to celebrate the centenary of Sangorski and Sutcliffe in a limited edition of 750 copies”.

Bibliography of ‘Omar Khayyám

Bibliography of ‘Omar Khayyám. Compiled by F. Angouráni and Z. Angouráni. Tehran, Society for the Appreciation of Cultural Works and Dignitaries, 2002.
410, 220 p.

Text in English and Persian.