Nearer the Heart's Desire
Poets of the Rubaiyat: A Dual Biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Written in Persian in the eleventh century, Omar Khayyam's quatrains, known as rubai, were written individually for an audience at court, and explored the meanings of life, love, and friendship. They were almost completely unknown in the West until Edward FitzGerald--himself a relatively obscure critic--translated and organized some one hundred of them into a unified whole that he called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which he published anonymously in 1859. Ignored initially, it soon became a sensation--and FitzGerald with it, his work now translated into seventy languages--and one of the most-read works of literature of all time.
Deftly and eloquently recounting in turn the life stories of Khayyam and FitzGerald, linking them over the span of eight centuries, acclaimed biographer Robert Richardson has crafted the story of the legendary Rubaiyat itself, illuminating a literary classic and reinforcing its place in the canon of great world literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Richardson (William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism) makes a noble but not wholly successful effort to unite the stories of the great 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam and the 19th-century Englishman who translated him. The first section, dealing with Khayyam, feels sketchy, partly because concrete facts about him are few; indeed, he may not even be responsible for all of the poems credited to him. Consequently, Richardson tries to describe Khayyam's milieu, though in somewhat cursory fashion. The book's second half, on translator Edward FitzGerald, finds Richardson on firmer ground, with more source material available to him. FitzGerald was a "perpetual student" who learned Persian for what would be his life's defining project: a translation of Khayyam's collected poetry, published with great success in 1859 as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which FitzGerald revised continually until his death in 1883. Richardson's portrayal of the Victorian writer and his era is lively, but his examination of Khayyam and the world of medieval Persia offers a tantalizing opening for further studies. Illus.
