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).
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Critical Celebrations of a Beloved Poem. E. Nakjavani.
Iranian Studies, 47 (2014), nr. 4, pp. 627-648.
Erik Nakjavani reviews and discusses two recent volumes on the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The first is ‘Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Famous Poem and its Influence’, by William H. Martin and Sandra Mason (Anthem Press, 2011). The reviewer discusses this work in respect of contemporary views about reception and assessment of poetry, by enthusiasts and devotees as well as scholars and academics. The second volume is ‘Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Popularity and Neglect’, edited by Adrian Poole, Christine van Ruymbeke, William H. Martin, and Sandra Mason (Anthem Press, 2011), in which he summarizes and discusses the separate essays.
Balkan Rubaiyat. The post-Ottoman polysystem between East and West. R. Mueller.
Paper, online available at Academia.edu, June 2014.
In the Balkans, two important national thinkers produced their own Rubaiyat translations. In 1920, Safvet-Beg Bašağić (1870-1934), Oriental scholar and father of Muslim nationalism in Bosnia, published the first translation of the acclaimed Rubaiyat in a South Slavic language. In 1926, Theofan Stylian Noli (1882-1965), ordained Orthodox priest, national intellectual and once-Prime Minister of Albania, published the first Albanian-language version of the Rubaiyat. What are we to make of the temporal and geographical convergence of these individuals and their text, their parallel projects of making a behemoth of modern world literature—itself situated in an unstable place between East and West—available to audiences in a newly post-Ottoman sphere?
Complete graphs in the Rubáiyát. D.P. May.
Journal of mathematics and the arts, 8 (2014), nrs. 1-2, p. 59-67.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám has fascinated readers for centuries, and it has been translated and interpreted many times. In this paper, we will describe a few basic graph theory concepts, and discuss how graph theory can be used to explore the connections between the various quatrains contained in Edward FitzGerald’s several translations of the Rubáiyát. We will explain the process of searching for certain complete subgraphs of the full graph of the Rubáiyát, and will briefly discuss how these ideas may be relevant in other areas. These applications include analysing other collections of poetry, teaching certain types of incidence geometry and poetic forms for composing short collections of poetry.
Khayyam, Omar vii. Translations into Italian. Casari, Mario.
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, May 2014.
The reception of Khayyam’s poetic work in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, was the result of the translation and rewriting of the English poet Edward FitzGerald (d. 1883) in the years 1859-79. In Italy the more scholarly approach to Khayyam’s work by a few dedicated Iranists proceeded at a fitful pace over many decades.
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Popularity and Neglect, edited by Adrian Poole, Christine van Ruymbeke, William H. Martin, and Sandra Mason (Review). A. Barton.
Victorian Studies, 56 (2014), Nr 2 (Winter), pp. 327-329.
FitzOmar the fascinating “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”. D. Rice
English review, 24 (2013) 1, pp. 16-19.
Edward FitzGerald’s imperfectly translated collection of 75 quatrains by the 12C Persian polymath Omar Khayyam has become a global phenomenon since its initial publication in 1859. The best known poetry book in the world, the “Rubaiyat” has been produced in at least 900 editions in 85 languages, while 130 artists have illustrated it and 150 composers have set it to music. This article suggests the many reasons for its success, such as the brevity and consequent digestibility of its four-line stanzas, the vivacity of the dramas they contain, and their sense of honesty, humour and reassurance. It also acknowledges the astute marketing and merchandising campaigns that helped to establish the collection’s assimilation into popular culture.