Edward Fitzgerald.
BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
- Title: Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam.
- Description:
Omar Khayyam was born at Naishapur in Khorassan about the middle of the 11th century. During a long life of study he became renowned and respected for his knowledge and wisdom, especially in astronomy and philosophy, and was one of eight men appointed by Malik Shah to reform the calendar. He wrote many poems in Arabic and Persian, but they contained a freedom of thought distasteful to orthodox Mohammedans, and it was on his scientific and philosophical studies that his fame among his countrymen rested. The collection of quatrains known as the Rubaiyat was discovered in a Persian manuscript in the Bodleian, and a transcript was sent to the poet Fitzgerald by his friend Professor Cowell. Fitzgerald`s masterly free translation of the verses was published by Quaritch in 1859 and was a complete failure. A copy was bought from the publisher`s penny box by Rosetti, who introduced it to Swinburne and meredith; and it was owing to the influence of these powerful critics that the Rubaiyat achieved universal fame. This Edition is illustrated with miniatures from a recently discovered manuscript dated 911 ah, believed to be the earliest, and probably the only Persian illuminated manuscript of the poem. The costly pigments used suggest that it was prepared for some Royal personage, such as the Sultan husayn Bayqara, one of the foremost patrons of art in the East. For him in Herat worked the great painter and miniaturist Bihzad, and it probable that the miniature facing the open stanzas was executed by him. The other miniatures, the perhaps lacking the master touch of Bihzad himself, are undoubtedly of the same school.
