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Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
1859 translations by Edward FitzGerald / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia".
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![]() Front cover of the first American edition (1878) | |
Author | Omar Khayyam |
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Translator | Edward FitzGerald |
Genre | Poetry |
Publisher | Bernard Quaritch |
Publication date | 1859 |
Text | Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia. Rendered into English Verse at Wikisource |
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_by_M._V._Dhurandhar.jpg/640px-Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_by_M._V._Dhurandhar.jpg)
Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".[1]
FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translation efforts in English, Hindi and in many other languages.