THIS year marks not only the bicentenary of Edward FitzGerald and the 150th anniversary of his immortal classic Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but also the first appearance of the two magnificent and sumptuously illustrated editions by Edmund Dulac and Willy Pogany produced for the Christmas market exactly one hundred years ago.
FitzGerald and his great translation share the same two anniversaries as Charles Darwin and his seminal work On the Origin of Species, but while the latter sold out its entire first print-run of 1,250 copies in only two days, the 210 copies of the Rubáiyát were gathering dust in one London bookshop, completely ignored and unnoticed.
It took a further two years for it to be discovered and lavishly praised by Ruskin, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, and its fame has continued to blossom and soar ever since.
The Rubáiyát has attracted more artists and illustrators than any other literary work in the past century, of which only a select number can be described in this feature and accompanying bibliography.
Omar Khayyam was born in Naishapur, in N.E. Persia, and died in the same city after a lifetime of around 83 years. The dates have never been certain, although recent extensive research has placed them as 1048-1131/2. He was a brilliant polymath, skilled in a wide array of subjects - mathematics, music, history, geography, medicine, philosophy, jurisprudence, and above all astronomy.
He was a pioneer in calendar reform, leading directly to our own Gregorian calendar. He produced learned treatises on algebra, physics, and the cause of different climates of various countries, wit
h numerous other standard works and significant contributions to human knowledge.
He also found time to compose around 500 epigrammatic four-line verses or 'quatrains' celebrating the pleasures of life. The Persian word 'rubaiyat' simply means a collection of these four-line verses.
These verses were circulated in manuscript form across Asia and Europe during the European Middle Ages, with several ending up in the great university libraries. The first known European translator of any of Omar Khayyam's verses was the renowned polyglot Rev. Thomas Hyde (1636-1703), who included a few in the Religion of the Ancient Persians (1700), together with an account of the life and works of Khayyam, all given here in Latin only.
Some of the verses were translated into English for the first time by Gore Ouseley (published in 1846), but the complete pioneering work was left to the remarkable gentleman-scholar Edward FitzGerald.
He was born at Bredfield Hall (near Woodbridge in Suffolk) in 1809, the seventh of eight children. His parents were John Purcell, the local High Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of the county, and Mary Frances FitzGerald.
The FitzGeralds were one of the richest families in Ireland, and when Mary inherited the entire family fortune in 1818, the Purnell surname of John and Mary and all their children was legally changed to FitzGerald.
Throughout his life, Edward FitzGerald always signed with a capital 'G' in his surname, unlike the usual 'Fitzgerald' version normally found today. After spending eight years at a boarding school in Bury St. Edmunds, Edward went up to Cambridge in 1826, along with three fellow pupils who all became lifelong friends: literary critic William Donne, Bacon scholar James Spedding, and Anglo-Saxon specialist John Kemble (brother of the actress Fanny).
During his years at Cambridge he befriended several students destined for great literary fame, notably Alfred Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray. Apart from a few visits to Ireland and a short trip to Ireland in 1830, the rest of FitzGerald's life was spent in his beloved Suffolk. He lived for several years in a cottage on his family's estate at Boulge, and for the last 23 years of his life he was based at Woodbridge.
During this period he spent much time sailing with Lowestoft fishermen off the Suffolk coast. FitzGerald's first published book (in 1849) was a biography of the Quaker poet Bernard Barton, whose daughter he subsequently married. Both in their late 40s, they were totally incompatible and separated after a few months.
He then composed a long essay in dialogue form Euphranor (1851), followed by Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Sayings (1852); and went on to produce translations of plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and other classical writers.
FitzGerald was first introduced to oriental literature by one of his numerous scholarly friends, Edward Byles Cowell, a leading authority on Sanskrit. In the early 1850s he taught FitzGerald all the subtletiesof the Persian language in the libraries at Cambridge and Oxford.
FitzGerald's first attempt at translating Persian was Salaman and Absal: An Allegory freely translated from the Persian of Jami, published by John Parker in 1856; and soon followed by Attar's Bird Parliament.
Around the same time, Cowell discovered a Persianmanuscript in the Bodleian Library's Ouseley Collection, written in purplish-black ink - powdered with gold - on thick yellow paper, and identified as Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát. Shortly before departing for Calcutta, Cowell gave FitzGerald a transcription of this manuscript to study carefully, and then translate into English poetry.
- If you would like to read the rest of this article, together with its complete bibliogragraphy and priceguide, it is in the December issue of Book and Magazine Collector...order your copy online by clicking here.
