A London exhibition explores the afterlife of mediaeval Persian poet Omar Khayyam's famous rubaiyat, writes David Tresilian Long a stand-by of secondhand bookshops, where dusty copies can be found sitting next to the Treasury of Kahlil Gibran and works of similar vintage, in its best known English form the rubaiyat, or quatrains, of Omar Khayyam were the creation of 19th-century British orientalism. The poems' first translator, Edward Fitzgerald, was a minor literary figure, a friend of Tennyson and of various members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though at best an amateur scholar of Khayyam's 11th- century Persian, Fitzgerald managed to produce a version of the poems that has ensured their continuing circulation and worldwide fame. This year marks the 150th anniversary of Fitzgerald's translation, which appeared in its original form in 1859, and the British Library in London has had the good idea of staging an exhibition to mark the event. Featuring copies of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat and materials on the poems' Persian author, the exhibition intriguingly brings together two apparently distant cultures, mediaeval Persia and 19th-century Britain, exploring unexpected sympathies. Fitzgerald discovered the Persian text of the rubaiyat in the late 1850s in the course of what seems to have been a rather desultory literary career. Following student years spent at Cambridge and the publication of a first literary work, Fitzgerald began studying Spanish and produced a version of Six Dramas of Calderon in 1853. He then turned to oriental studies, and when the then professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, Edward Cowell, sent Fitzgerald a copy of the rubaiyat he had come across in Oxford's Bodleian Library, Fitzgerald's true vocation as a translator was born. A first edition of his translation was published at Fitzgerald's expense, and this was taken up by literary London after its discovery on a remaindered book stall. Expanded editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam then appeared, bringing both Fitzgerald and Khayyam what has turned out to be lasting fame, thanks in part to the support of well-known British artistic figures of the time, including poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti and A. C. Swinburne and artists William Morris and Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Born in 1048 in Nishapur near Mashhad in eastern Persia, Omar Khayyam was best known in his own lifetime for his philosophical and scientific views. Even before Fitzgerald's discovery of his rubaiyat, Khayyam was not unknown in Europe, and an earlier English translation appeared in 1816. Khayyam is also mentioned in the 17th-century orientalist Thomas Hyde's Historia religionis veterum Persarum, a work on the religious history of Persia, a copy of which is included in the present exhibition. The exhibition also includes copies, drawn from British Library collections, of works in Persian either mentioning or written by Khayyam. The first is a 17th-century copy of Nizami Aruzi's Chahar Magalah (Four Discourses), which, written in the mid 12th century, includes a description of meeting Khayyam in Balkh in 1112/ 13.in present-day Afghanistan. This was followed by a visit to Khayyam's grave in Nishapur in 1135/36, which Aruzi found covered in peach blossoms. The second work is a 15th-century copy of Khayyam's own Risalah fi kulliyat al-wudjud, which sets out his philosophical views. The exhibition does not include an account of Khayyam's scientific work, which is a pity. This was written in Arabic, testifying to the linguistic division at work in Khayyam's part of the world at the time, Persian for poetry and literature and Arabic for works of science, philosophy and theology. Khayyam's views on algebra are set out in treatises on "the division of the quadrant of a circle" and "proofs of problems in algebra," still extant, and on arithmetic in a treatise on "difficult problems in arithmetic," now lost. His treatise on geometry, a "commentary on difficulties in the book of Euclid," is considered to be a particularly important work that preceded developments in European mathematics by several centuries. There are also works in Arabic on mechanics and music and philosophical treatises that establish Khayyam as an Aristotleian and follower of Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Modern translations of Khayyam's rubaiyat describe Fitzgerald's English version of the poems as being free at best, and Fitzgerald himself abandoned any pretence of having translated Khayyam's original quatrains from the second edition of his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam onwards, in which the poems are described as being "rendered" into English. One of the main differences between Fitzgerald's translations and those by subsequent translators lies in the ordering of the poems, with Fitzgerald reordering the quatrains in the manuscripts he used in the light of his conception of the whole. Another difference lies in modern estimations of the authenticity of the quatrains and their attribution to Khayyam. While the Oxford manuscript used by Fitzgerald contained 158 quatrains, others attribute between 56 and 315 individual poems to Khayyam, with scholarly battles still raging over the attributions of individual poems and the size of the corpus as a whole. In his treatment of the poems Fitzgerald also followed 19th-century translation practices rather than those of a later age. This was a period that prized oriental atmosphere over accuracy, as can be seen from Richard Burton's famous versions of the Thousand and One Nights, translated from Arabic into a mixture of the authorised version of the Bible and Jacobean verse, with sections omitted or added. Fitzgerald, too, chose to translate Khayyam's Persian into the language of his age, arriving at the kind of mellifluous Tennysonian idiom beloved by late-Victorian taste. All this was swept away by the revolution that overtook English poetry in the early years of the last century, with the result that Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a monument as much of late Victorian literature as it is of British orientalism. The present exhibition emphasises the afterlife of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat in the illustrated editions of the poem that appeared in the later decades of the 19th century and the earlier decades of the 20th. The golden age of such sometimes lavish editions of Fitzgerald's work was in the latter period, when the Rubaiyat seems to have appealed particularly to the gift book market, with no fewer than 37 new editions and reprints of the work appearing in 1909 alone. An edition of the poems with illustrations by Edmund Dulac, one of the famous illustrators of the time, was published in the latter year, and the exhibition includes details of what seems to have been a particularly lavish production by Francis Sangorski, the only known copy of which went down on the Titanic in 1912. The vogue for Khayyam's mediaeval Persian poems may be connected to the literary vogue for all things oriental at the time and perhaps for similar reasons. Rather like the Victorian taste for the mediaeval and Arthurian, mined by cultural figures from Pugin to Tennyson, the orient was a source of heightened colour and the picturesque, as well as an escape from drab industrial civilisation. The prevailing theme was one of loss, with mass production and bourgeois time-keeping having replaced the heroic possibilities of a former age. Under these conditions, what better to do than "fill the cup / before life's liquor in its cup be dry," as Fitzgerald's translation has it -- while bearing in mind that this gives a false idea of Khayyam's poetry and its place in Persian literature, as well as of its author's larger contributions to science, philosophy and mathematics. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, British Library, London, until 21 February
