The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

About

FitzGerald's 1859 translation of the eleventh-century Persian mathematician-poet Omar Khayyam is one of the great creative acts of Victorian literature: not so much a translation as a reimagining, turning the rubaiyat (quatrains) into a sustained meditation on wine, love, time, and the indifference of the cosmos. The stanzas ('A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou') became some of the most quoted lines in English. The poem's hedonistic philosophy, exquisitely packaged in melancholy verse, made it a sensation in the 1860s and it has never entirely left public consciousness.