Description

In 1859, Edward Fitzgerald translated into English the short, epigrammatic poems (or "rubaiyat") of medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Except his translation was not truly a translation. His Omar seems to have read Lucretius, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. Nevertheless, the poem conveyed some of the most beautiful and haunting images in English poetry--and some of the sharpest-edged--and by the end of the century, it was one of the best-known poems in the English language. Daniel Karlin's richly annotated edition focuses on the poem as a work of Victorian literary art, doing justice to the scope and complexity of Fitzgerald's lyrical meditation on "human death and fate." Karlin provides a history of publication and revision, a long critical introduction, and extensive textual and explanatory notations. He documents the poem's treatment of its Persian sources, along with its multiple affiliations with English and Classical literature and to the Bible. A selection of contemporary reviews offers an insight into the poem's early reception, including the first attack on its status as a translation.

Features

• This splendid edition of FitzGerald's famous version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám celebrates the poem as a work of Victorian literary art, together with the astonishing story of its first publication as it rose from obscurity to contain some of the most quoted lines in English poetry.
• It reproduces the first 1859 edition of this much-revised poem and documents the changes made in subsequent editions as well as the corresponding stanzas.
• Daniel Karlin's introduction aims to introduce the poem to a new generation of readers; it discusses FitzGerald's treatment of his Persian sources and theory of translation, his life and the circumstances of the poem's composition and revisions, its relation to the Orientalist tradition, Victorian literature and the Victorian context.
• Explanatory notes include selective details of the relation between the English version and its Persian original, as well as information about literary and historical sources and allusions, and relevant biographical episodes.
• A selection of contemporary reviews offers an insight into the poem's early reception, including the first attack on its status as a 'translation'; a further appendix reprints Tennyson's affectionate and moving poem 'To E. FitzGerald' - a poem begun as a dedication and ended as an elegy.

Product Details

224 pages; ISBN13: 978-0-19-954297-0ISBN10: 0-19-954297-X

About the Author(s)