A Rubaiyat is a collection of four line verses, often known as quatrains in English.  Each verse is a Rubai (meaning 4 in Arabic and Farsi (Persian)), and Rubaiyat is the Arabic plural for this word.  The Rubaiyat usually have a specific metre and rhyming scheme;  the latter is most usually AABA. 

In Persian literature, a quatrain or Rubai is generally accepted as being complete in itself, a form of epigram expressing a thought or idea. A quatrain should not normally have any relationship to other rubai in the Rubaiyat, and, in principle, individual lines, phrases, or words in the quatrain are only components of the whole verse.

There is no direct evidence that Omar Khayyam was the author of any of the quatrains attributed to him. There are no original manuscripts of the Rubaiyat extant and no evidence from his contemporaries, or in the years immediately following his death, of poetic activities by Khayyam.  Edward FitzGerald gleaned his words initially from one of the earliest known manuscripts, namely that in the Sir William Ouseley collection in the Bodleian library in Oxford. This contains 158 quatrains and is dated 1460/61; it was thus put together over 300 years after the death of Omar Khayyam.

In preparing his first edition, FitzGerald also had access to another key manuscript, the Calcutta version, containing 516 quatrains. This manuscript, undated and now lost, was copied and sent to him from India by Edward Cowell. Other manuscripts attributed to Omar Khayyam, some with an even larger number of verses, and others with only a few quatrains, have been discovered; nearly all are dated later than the Ouseley manuscript, and some have been used by other translators. A number are now known to have been collections of verses from a variety of poets, and, more recently, there have been forgeries purporting to be manuscripts of the work of Omar Khayyam.

At the present time, Khayyam scholars suggest that relatively few of the large numbers of quatrains attributed to Khayyam are likely to have been by him. Serious questioning of authenticity dates from the late 19th century, particularly from 1897, when Zhukovsky, the Russian scholar revealed that 82 quatrains, attributed to Khayyam, were by other poets; he called these the Wandering Quatrains. Since then, there has been further research in Europe as well as in Iran on the authenticity of quatrains, and analyses by Ross and Christensen have raised the ‘wandering’ figure to 108. It is now reckoned that the number of quatrains that can be fairly said to be by Khayyam may be under 200. Dashti, a key Iranian authority, considers that only 36 quatrains have a real likelihood of authenticity.

FitzGerald published his first version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1859. This first edition contained 75 quatrains (four line verses known in Persian as rubai, plural rubaiyat) and it was published anonymously by FitzGerald himself, using the services of Bernard Quaritch. The poem was not a precise translation of Khayyam’s Persian verses, but a personal interpretation by him, ‘a paraphrase of a syllabus’ as he called it on one occasion[].

Although FitzGerald’s first edition of the Rubaiyat had an unpromising initial reception, it was gradually taken up by the English speaking literary world. But FitzGerald remained dissatisfied with his first efforts. He began to have access to other versions of the Persian originals, notably the work by the Frenchman Nicolas published in Paris in 1867[]. In 1868, FitzGerald finalised a second edition containing 110 quatrains. and, in 1872, a third edition, which was cut back to 101 quatrains. In 1879, there came the fourth edition; this again contained 101 quatrains, and it was published together with FitzGerald’s version of Jami’s Salaman and Absal[]. In 1889, the very minor changes that created a fifth edition of 101 quatrains were included in a collection of letters and literary remains, published after FitzGerald’s death; this final edition was reprinted separately at least twice in 1890[],

The analysis of the different editions of the Rubaiyat produced by FitzGerald and the revisions to the text that he made in them is quite complicated.  More details are given in our book The Art of Omar Khayyam.  A comparative presentation of the text of the first four editions is to be found in Frederick Evans’s Variorum Edition published in 1914 and in Decker’s more recent publication. The fifth edition had only minor differences, mainly in punctuation, from the fourth.  To see the text of the first editions, click here.  For a few favourite verses, follow this link.

Our book also summarises some information about the manuscript and other sources on which each of the quatrains is based. This draws praticularly  on the work of Heron-Allen and Arberry. But the experts are not always agreed on the source quatrains that FitzGerald used in his poem.  Heron-Allen revised some of his analyses in his work on FitzGerald’s second edition in 1908, and Arberry specifically disputes Heron-Allen’s conclusions for some quatrains.