The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam was a Persian mathematician who was born in Nishapur in 1048 CE which at that time was ruled by the Seljuk Turks. His name in Arabic, the language of Islam, was Abu’l Fath Omar in Ibrahim al-Khayyam, and because Khayyam is tent-maker in Arabic, it is thought that his family trade might have been tent makers. We have details of his horoscope and so his birth is dated by that to 18 th May 1048.

Nishapur had been a stronghold of the old Persian pre-Islamic religion, Zoroastrianism, which still survives, though much diminished in the number of worshippers. It is thought that Omar Khayyam’s father may have been a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam and that might explain who Omar Khayyam ended up writing a poem in celebration of wine as the antidote to an uncertain death, which he seems to take as a final curtain.

Omar studied mathematics and moved around the region, working in the famous silk route cities of Bokhara and Samarkand and then back to Isfahan where he was commissioned to set up an astronomical observatory. It is thought that after the Sultan Malik-Shah was murdered by the Order of the Assassins that Omar fell out of favour, possibly because of religious unorthodoxy and moved to Marv possibly to work as court astrologer.

He was a famous mathematician, and astronomer/astrolger and also a poet. The earliest surviving quote from this work is from 1160, but these days academics doubt Khayyam actually wrote them and that they were attributed to him because of his fame. Most of the work is written in Persian but some in Arabic.

Some people think that the Rubaiyat is mystical Sufi poetry where the wine and the rose are symbols of God. Others believe that this is not the case and in fact he did think that the only solution to this brief and sad life is to drink heavily. Khayyam’s life does not however seem to have been brief or sad and he was very successful. Of course success, fame and wealth do not preclude depression. Others including Christopher Hitchens, believe that Khayyam was an atheist like them and the work is overtly atheist.

The most famous, if not the most accurate, translation of the Rubaiyat is by Edward Fitzgerald, who translated the Persian to English and published it in 1859 in the Fraser’s Magazine.

Fitzgerald was an English poet born in 1809 in Woodbridge, Suffolk. Fitzgerald was his mother’s family name, assumed by his father John Purcell. His mother had one fortune then inherited a second. The Fitzgeralds were one of the wealthiest families in England. Fitzgerald is believed by academics these days to have been gay and was almost vegetarian, eating mainly bread and fruit. Despite, or perhaps because of his diet, he lived until he was 74 and died in the neighbouring county of Norfolk (62 miles from his birthplace). In fact he lived quietly all his life in East Anglia.

The Rubaiyat was not successful at first but then taken up by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists in England and he went to a third edition by 1872 and became a best seller in the English-speaking world so that there were even Omar Khayyam clubs and there was (to quote the Wikipedia) a fin de siecle cult of the Rubaiyat.

When scholars look at Fitzgerald’s translation they find it rather free and in some cases Fitzgerald’s verses cannot be traced back to a Persian original. This was the time of fabricating ancient poetry of course (think of Ossian, and the work of Iolo Morgannwg).

The fame of the Rubaiyat then is partly due to Omar Khayyam but also in part to Edward Fitzgerald.

Two words that you may not know are ‘blow’ which is an older usage for when a flower blooms and ‘enow’ which is an alternative for ‘enough’.