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Date Posted: 16:16:20 08/15/07 Wed
Author: Roger
Subject: Rubaiyat (for Angina)

A while ago, I posted a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which Angina asked about, but I didn't get around to replying. The Rubaiyat are quatrains written by the Sufi, Omar Khayyam, in the twelfth century, and translated into English at various times, most famously by Edward Fitzgerald in the Nineteenth century. I came to like these little poems, and since they are available in so many gift editions and "Great Works" subscriptions, I started collecting them. I have 76 copies now, with various illustrators. My oldest was published in 1876.

The poems contain such well known stanzas as:

The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on. Not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

or:

Here with a book of verse beneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
Ah, wilderness were paradise enow!

I could go on, as I know quite a few of them, but the books are fairly easy to find. Fitzgerald wrote five versions of the text. The most popular is the first, which had 76 quatrains, I believe, and the fourth, with 101 quatrains IIRC, is about second. There was some dropping and adding of quatrains between editions, and some rewriting of others. "Rubaiyat" is the plural of "Rubai" the Persian word for a particular style of quatrain.

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Replies:

Re: Rubaiyat (for Angina) -- Organ Morgan, 14:31:39 08/16/07 Thu