A Translation More Famous Than Its Original

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Edward FitzGerald published his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1859, at his own expense, and it sold so poorly that the unsold stock ended up in a bookseller's penny bargain box, where the scholar Whitley Stokes discovered it in July 1861, about two years after publication, and brought it to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite friends who made its reputation. FitzGerald was not translating in any strict sense; he compressed, reordered, invented transitions between quatrains that had no fixed sequence in his Persian sources, and wrote in his own letters that he preferred a lively rendering to a literal one, transplanting Khayyam's wine, roses and mortality into a fluent nineteenth-century English idiom that reads more like FitzGerald's own poem in Khayyam's voice than a strict rendering of any single Persian text. Later, more scholarly, more literal translations of Khayyam exist and are more accurate to what the underlying Persian quatrains actually say; almost none of them are the version English readers know by heart. FitzGerald's free translation is, by a wide margin, the more famous poem, in English, than anything closer to Khayyam's own words has ever managed to become.