In 1859, Edward FitzGerald translated into English the short, epigrammatic poems (or "rubaiyat") of medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. If not a true translation--his Omar seems to have read Shakespeare and the King James Bible--the poem nevertheless conveyed some of the most beautiful and haunting images in English poetry, and some of the sharpest-edged. By the end of the century, it was one of the best-known poems in the English language, admired by Swinburne and Ruskin. Daniel Karlin's richly annotated edition focuses on the poem as a work of Victorian literary art, doing justice to the...
In 1859, Edward FitzGerald translated into English the short, epigrammatic poems (or "rubaiyat") of medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. If not a true ...
