The Rubaiyyat Of Omar Khayyam

By Reeza Hameed –SEPTEMBER 3, 2017

Dr. Reeza Hameed

The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam as rendered by Fitzgerald has remained an enduring favourite among poetry lovers all over the world. Khayyam is a poet for all seasons.

Khayyam was one of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers to come out of the Islamic world of the middle ages. He was a contemporary of Ali ibn Sina, known to the West as Avicenna. Khayyam was a polymath in an era which produced polymaths by the dozens, many of whom are known to the West only by their Latinised names, but Khayyam’s name survives in the Arabic original.

Khayyam had mastered many disciplines. In addition to mathematics and astronomy, he was fluent in philosophy, medicine, geography, physics, and music. Ibn Sina taught him philosophy for many years. He also learnt medicine and physics from that great man. Another contemporary was Al-Zamakshari, well-known for his commentary of the Quran.

Khayyam was one of the greatest astronomers of the Middle Ages, and in recognition of his contributions, a crater on the Moon was named after him. In mathematics, he virtually invented the field of geometric algebra. His treatise on Algebra was used in Europe as a standard text even as late as the nineteenth century.

He was not known for his poetry, until he was reborn as a poet in the second half of the nineteenth century in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of his Rubaiyyat, which catapulted him to poetic stardom. Had it not been for Fitzgerald, Khayyam’s fame might have rested on his contributions to astronomy, mathematics or the development of the Jalali calendar to replace the Julian calendar. He alludes to his involvement in the calendar in one of his verses.

 Ah, by my Computations, People say,
Reduce the Year to better reckoning?

The publication of the Rubaiyyat resulted in the emergence of a Khayyam cult in Victorian England and in the United States. The Rubaiyyat has been so closely identified with its translator that it is sometimes referred to under Victorian poetry. Its popularity perhaps lay in the fact that it sang of the pleasures proscribed in straight jacketed Victorian England.

The Rubaiyyat had many admirers among English poets and men of literature, and their names read like a roll call of the famous: Swinburne, Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Tennyson, Longfellow, John Ruskin, T S Eliot, and Meredith. Khayyam poetry clubs sprang up in England and in the United States. Longfellow in ‘Haroun al Rashid’ betrays Khayyam’s influence upon him.

“Where are the kings, and where the rest
Of those who once the world possessed?
“They’re gone with all their pomp and show,
They’re gone the way that thou shalt go.”

Poetry is that which is lost in translation. In Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyyat, poetry might have gained in the process. Fitzgerald, it would seem, mistranslated the Rubaiyyat, and some would say gloriously so.

If his poetry is any indication of Khayyam’s philosophy, he grappled with universal themes such as the here and the hereafter, life and death, mortality and eternity, fate and freewill. Fitzgerald portrayed Khayyam as a fatalist, a hedonist, and an agnostic.

One of the most famous of Khayyam’s quatrains is the ‘moving finger verse’, which conveys the controlling effect of fate in the affairs of men.

Read More