The Rubaiyat

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

Omar Khayyam spent his working life as a mathematician and astronomer, reforming the Persian calendar and advancing the algebraic study of cubic equations; poetry, on the evidence that survives from his own lifetime, was not the reputation he was known for. No manuscript in Khayyam's own hand survives, and the earliest surviving quatrains attributed to him were copied down decades, in some cases well over a century, after his death, at a period when it had become a running convention to attach anonymous or unattributed ruba'i to famous names as a kind of literary shorthand. Some scholars accept a core group of quatrains as genuinely his; others treat the entire attributed corpus as a name that accumulated poems over centuries rather than a body of work one poet actually wrote. This is not a settled dispute this entry can resolve in either direction; see the open question below.

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.