Special Collections
Book of the Month, May 2009
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia
Trans. by Edward Fitzgerald
London: B. Quaritch, 1859
[S.L.] I [Fitzgerald - 1859]
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Trans. by Edward Fitzgerald
London: Siegle, Hill, [1910?]
[S.L.] IV [Sangorski] fol.
To English-speaking readers, Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) has immortalised the Rubáiyát by the mediaeval Persian poet Omar Khayyám – and, as his free translation of this poem is Fitzgerald’s major work, often quoted and translated into many other languages, it has immortalised him. The poem’s theme is the pleasures of the fleeting moment. Fitzgerald originally submitted 35 verses to Fraser’s Magazine, which rejected them, in 1858. He then published the first edition at his own expense in 1859: 75 quatrains, occupying sixteen pages, plus an eleven-page preface and five pages of notes. The drab booklet caused no stir until Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne discovered it, remaindered on a stall in St Martin’s Lane, in 1861. It then ran through three further editions in Fitzgerald’s lifetime – in 1868, 1872 and 1879 – for each of which he revised it, until, in 1879, the poem ran to 101 stanzas.
The illustration here is from an edition of 1910, reproduced from a manuscript written and illuminated by Francis Sangorski and George Sutcliffe, famous for their bookbindings. The edition existed in 550 copies. Both it and the first edition are in the Sterling Library, featuring first and fine editions of English literature.
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