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An Omar for Ladies

An Omar for Ladies. Josephine Daskam Bacon
In: A Parody Anthology, collected by C. Wells. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904. p. 5-7.

Potter 1115

Omar von Berlin

Omar von Berlin. F.F.D. Alberry.
Kelmscott: Clarke, [1904]. 16 p.

Second edition The Rowfant Press, Columbus, Ohio, 1915.

Potter 1117

Photopoetry and the Problem of Translation in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát

Photopoetry and the Problem of Translation in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Michael Nott.
Victorian Studies, 58 (2016), 4, pp. 661-695.

In the early twentieth century, two photographers produced illustrated editions of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). This essay examines the photographs of Mabel Eardley-Wilmot and Adelaide Hanscom Leeson, and explores how the Rubáiyát, while not an Orientalist poem, prompted Orientalist responses in photography. Eardley-Wilmot and Hanscom Leeson’s photobooks are early examples of photopoetry, a neglected art form in which combinations of poems and photographs create illustrative, evocative, and symbiotic relationships between text and image. Given FitzGerald’s own interest in photographic culture and the poem’s concerns with literal and metaphorical truths, the Rubáiyát illuminates practices of understanding and translating other cultures in the Victorian period.

The exquisite amateur. FitzGerald, the Rubáiyát, and queer dilettantism

The exquisite amateur. FitzGerald, the Rubáiyát, and queer dilettantism. Benjamin Hudson
Victorian Poetry 54 (2016) 2 (Summer), pp. 155-177.

Though both popular and critical appraisals of FitzGerald’s translation have pointed out his, or the poem’s, amateurism, no inquiry has considered how the text itself cultivates its own antiprofessional stance—how it, in other words, invites readers to “Make Game” of life. Although this point may seem to be self-evident in a poem dedicated to inebriate pleasure, it is nonetheless worth considering, and clearly establishing, in order to identify how this amateurism, complicates erotic readings of the poem while enriching current critiques of its antiteleological temporality and agnosticism.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Muslim secularism

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Muslim secularism. Juan Cole
Studies in People’s History 3 (2016) 2, pp. 138-150.

The fact that quatrains known as Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam were not really composed by the twelfth century astronomer of that name, but composed by various hands and made into collections later, is widely accepted. This paper examines under what political and social atmosphere in later times, the collections began to be compiled, and what elements of scepticism, irreligion, mysticism and even rationalism entered into them. It is argued that the collections retained their popularity and freely circulated wherever Persian was cultivated down to modern times.