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A brief summary
(click on headings for more details - see also
under Who's who for information on other people
involved with the Rubaiyat)
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Omar Khayyam (1048- c.1131)
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He was a famous Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher,
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He lived in the 11/12th centuries and worked at the court in Eastern Iran.
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Many verses (four line quatrains or
rubai) have been attributed to him but it
is not clear how many of these he actually composed.
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One of the earliest established collections of quatrains dates from 1461.
This Ouseley manuscript, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, was used by
FitzGerald in his translation.
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Edward FitzGerald
(1809-1883)
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Edward FitzGerald was a wealthy Victorian ‘gentleman of letters’ who
lived most of his life in Suffolk, in and around Woodbridge.
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A chance meeting with a local young man named Edward Cowell (later a
Professor at Cambridge) set FitzGerald on to his Persian studies.
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Cowell discovered the Ouseley manuscript of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in the
Bodleian Library, and sent a copy to FitzGerald.
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This, together with another larger manuscript from Calcutta, provided
FitzGerald with the basis for his Rubaiyat.
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FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
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FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was first published in 1859. It
contained 75 quatrains, and was an interpretation not a literal translation of
the verses attributed to Khayyam.
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After an initial failure, FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat became ever more popular,
at first in Britain, then in the United States and then in the rest of the
world.
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The Rubiayat has been translated into over 70 different languages to become
the most widely known poem in the world. A new edition has been published almost
every year since the 1880’s.
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As well as being a beautiful poem, the philosophy of the Rubaiyat seems to
have appealed to many people over the years.
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