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
Introduction: FitzGerald's Rubáiyát: Popularity and Neglect
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
Famously, the neglect came first. Born in 1809, Edward FitzGerald was approaching his fiftieth birthday when he started translating some of the rubáiyát or quatrains attributed to the twelfth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám to whom his younger friend Edward Cowell had introduced him a few years earlier. In May 1857 he told Cowell, who had gone to Calcutta as Professor of History at Presidency College, that ‘Omar breathes a sort of Consolation to me! Poor Fellow; I think of him, and Olivier Basselin, and Anacreon; lighter Shadows among the Shades, perhaps, over which Lucretius presides so grimly.’
These were particularly grim times for FitzGerald. He had need of consolation in the wake of his miserable marriage to Lucy Barton the previous November, a grievous error at least partly provoked by Cowell's departure for India; he would soon have need of more when William Kenworthy Browne, another younger friend, was fatally injured in a riding accident. By the end of 1857 FitzGerald had sent 35 of the ‘less wicked’ stanzas to the editor of Fraser's magazine John Parker (Letters II, 419). Still too wicked for Parker, they languished with him for a year until the author took them back and, along with 40 more quatrains, had them printed privately and anonymously. There was no rush to buy the slim brown pamphlet from Bernard Quaritch's bookshop in the spring of 1859.
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- FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyámPopularity and Neglect, pp. xvii - xxviPublisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011