Poetry
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
رباعیات
Omar Khayyam · 1100
Synopsis
Several hundred quatrains, poems of four lines, each of which forms a whole. They speak of the brevity of life and the flight of time, of man's ignorance before fate and before God, of wine and love as refuges of the moment; they also ask, without answering, what comes after death. No narrative links them: each quatrain can be read on its own, and each collection arranges a different selection of them.
Context
The quatrains at first appear only quoted here and there in prose works, some decades after the scholar's death, and the manuscript collections that gather them are much later. Over the centuries, the number of pieces attributed to him has kept growing: the collections include from a few dozen to more than a thousand, and some specialists regard only about one hundred and fifty as authentic. The Englishman Edward FitzGerald published in 1859 a free adaptation that made them famous in the West. In French, Armand Robin's translation was reissued in 1994 in the Poésie collection, and Sadegh Hedayat's critical edition appeared in translation from José Corti in 1993.
Who it is for
Very brief pieces, to be read one by one. It is worth knowing that editions retain very different numbers of quatrains, the authentic portion remaining disputed.
Prizes and reception
Among the most widely read Persian poems in the world, especially since FitzGerald's English adaptation, reissued hundreds of times.