Hazhir Teimourian
Khayyamania
A Book of Verse: The Biography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
By Garry Garrard
Sutton Publishing 270pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Art of Omar Khayyam: Illustrating FitzGerald’s Rubaiayat
By William H Martin and Sandra Mason
I B Tauris 184pp £40 order from our bookshop
Nothing lasts for ever, except our saying so: ‘Out, out, brief candle!’ Judging by the remains of flowers in their graves, even Neanderthal men cried over their short ‘hour upon the stage’, and this has to explain why the combination of an eleventh-century Persian jotter of secret verse that refuted the certainties of Islam and a nineteenth-century English gentleman who rejected the conformities demanded by Victorian society has proved the most successful literary pairing in history. Weight by weight, apparently, Edward FitzGerald’s ‘rendering’ – as he put it – of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam into English has spawned more phrases in the language than the Bible and Shakespeare together.
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