Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: FitzGerald's Rubáiyát: Popularity and Neglect
- Chapter 1 Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám and the Tradition of Verse Translation into English
- Chapter 2 Much Ado about Nothing in the Rubáiyát
- Chapter 3 Common and Queer: Syntax and Sexuality in the Rubáiyát
- Chapter 4 A Victorian Poem: Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
- Chapter 5 FitzGerald's Rubáiyát and Agnosticism
- Chapter 6 The Similar Lives and Different Destinies of Thomas Gray, Edward FitzGerald and A. E.Housman
- Chapter 7 The Second (1862 Pirate) Edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
- Chapter 8 Edward Heron-Allen: A Polymath's Approach to FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
- Chapter 9 ‘Under Omar's subtle spell’: American Reprint Publishers and the Omar Craze
- Chapter 10 The Imagined Elites of the Omar Khayyám Club
- Chapter 11 Le Gallienne's Paraphrase and the Limits of Translation
- Chapter 12 ‘Some for the Glories of the Sole’: The Rubáiyát and FitzGerald's Sceptical American Parodists
- Chapter 13 The Vogue of the English Rubáiyát and Dedicatory Poems in Honour of Khayyám and FitzGerald
- Chapter 14 The Illustration of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát and its Contribution to Enduring Popularity
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám and the Tradition of Verse Translation into English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: FitzGerald's Rubáiyát: Popularity and Neglect
- Chapter 1 Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám and the Tradition of Verse Translation into English
- Chapter 2 Much Ado about Nothing in the Rubáiyát
- Chapter 3 Common and Queer: Syntax and Sexuality in the Rubáiyát
- Chapter 4 A Victorian Poem: Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
- Chapter 5 FitzGerald's Rubáiyát and Agnosticism
- Chapter 6 The Similar Lives and Different Destinies of Thomas Gray, Edward FitzGerald and A. E.Housman
- Chapter 7 The Second (1862 Pirate) Edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
- Chapter 8 Edward Heron-Allen: A Polymath's Approach to FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
- Chapter 9 ‘Under Omar's subtle spell’: American Reprint Publishers and the Omar Craze
- Chapter 10 The Imagined Elites of the Omar Khayyám Club
- Chapter 11 Le Gallienne's Paraphrase and the Limits of Translation
- Chapter 12 ‘Some for the Glories of the Sole’: The Rubáiyát and FitzGerald's Sceptical American Parodists
- Chapter 13 The Vogue of the English Rubáiyát and Dedicatory Poems in Honour of Khayyám and FitzGerald
- Chapter 14 The Illustration of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát and its Contribution to Enduring Popularity
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was for a while the most famous verse translation ever made into English, and its extraordinary popular success – which lasted for perhaps a century, from about the 1860s to the 1960s – has ensured that it has been much picked over, carped at, imitated, admired and condescended to. If I had to decide I would put myself in the admiring and imitating camp, and I have at one time or another harboured quite a lot of irritation against those who have thought themselves superior enough to condescend to FitzGerald and his achievement. But rather than either simply carp or admire I want to start by considering the very peculiar nature of what FitzGerald did in the Rubáiyát.
To begin with, the impetus behind his translation, what prompted him to do it as it were, seems to be only partly comparable to what prompted most of his predecessors as verse translators into English to do what they did. In the middle years of the eighteenth century Thomas Gray noted in one of his letters that a history of English verse could easily be written showing how its two chief models had, since the time of Chaucer, been verse in French and Italian, and that these two models had tended to alternate in their hold on the English poetic imagination from one century to the next.
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- FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyámPopularity and Neglect, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011