This edition presents the classic free translation by Edward Fitzgerald of the great Persian poem (rubaiyat) by the 12th century astronomer and poet - Omar Khayyam.Fitzgerald's masterful translation was first published as an anonymous pamphlet in 1859. Its colourful, exotic and remote imagery greatly appealed to the Victorian age's fascination with the Orient, while its luxurious sensual warmth acted as a striking counterpoint to the growth of scientific determinism, industrialisation and the soulless Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Greatly praised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin and William Morris, the romantic melancholy of the poem anticipates the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy, while its epicurean motifs link it to the Aesthetic Movement.
My grandfather, born in the second half of thenineteenth century in a fishing village in the northeast of Scotland, naturally enough followed a career at sea. At one point he served as third mate on the Persia - an iron-built, steam-and-sail-powered packet for Cunard, which had set an Atlanticcrossing record on her maiden voyage. He got a master’s ticket early, and had sailed on dippers too - jumping ship in Australia on one of his first trips, and joining the Sydney fire brigade for a year. Latterly, he sat on the bench as a police judge and JP, smoked Burma cheroots and, though he never was a regular attender himself, made sure the children were driven off to church each Sunday while he pruned his roses out in the front garden and sang snatches from ’Old Ranzo’or some other shanty. He only figures here because Omar’s Rubaivat was one of his favourite texts: I still have his copy, with Burne-Jones-style illustrations, and grandpa’s broad-nibbed annotations and ticks of approval. He did keep the work of other poets on his shelves, but none gave much evidence of being consulted. What he found congenial in FitzGerald’s translated quatrains - and what continues to provide an attraction - is one of the issues that engaged me in preparing this brief commentary on the poem and its context……