What is a
Rubaiyat
A Rubaiyat is a collection of four line
verses, often known as quatrains in English. Each verse is a Rubai
(meaning 4 in Arabic and Farsi (Persian)), and Rubaiyat is the Arabic
plural for this word. The Rubaiyat usually have a specific metre
and rhyming scheme; the latter is most usually AABA.
In Persian literature, a quatrain or Rubai
is generally accepted as being complete in itself, a form of epigram expressing
a thought or idea. A quatrain should not normally have any relationship to other
rubai in the Rubaiyat, and, in principle, individual lines,
phrases, or words in the quatrain are only components of the whole verse.
Sources of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
There is no direct evidence that Omar
Khayyam was the author of any of the quatrains attributed to him. There are
no original manuscripts of the Rubaiyat extant and no evidence from his
contemporaries, or in the years immediately following his death, of poetic
activities by Khayyam. Edward FitzGerald gleaned his words initially from
one of the earliest known manuscripts, namely that in the Sir William Ouseley
collection in the Bodleian library in Oxford. This contains 158 quatrains and is
dated 1460/61; it was thus put together over 300 years after the death of Omar
Khayyam.
In preparing his first edition, FitzGerald
also had access to another key manuscript, the Calcutta version, containing 516
quatrains. This manuscript, undated and now lost, was copied and sent to him
from India by Edward Cowell. Other manuscripts attributed to Omar Khayyam, some
with an even larger number of verses, and others with only a few quatrains, have
been discovered; nearly all are dated later than the Ouseley manuscript, and
some have been used by other translators. A number are now known to have been
collections of verses from a variety of poets, and, more recently, there have
been forgeries purporting to be manuscripts
of the work of Omar Khayyam.
At the present time, Khayyam
scholars suggest that relatively few of the large numbers of quatrains
attributed to Khayyam are likely to have been by him. Serious questioning of
authenticity dates from the late 19th century, particularly from 1897, when
Zhukovsky, the Russian scholar revealed that 82 quatrains, attributed to
Khayyam, were by other poets; he called these the Wandering Quatrains. Since
then, there has been further research in Europe as well as in Iran on the
authenticity of quatrains, and analyses by Ross and Christensen have raised the
‘wandering’ figure to 108. It is now reckoned that the number of quatrains
that can be fairly said to be by Khayyam may be under 200. Dashti, a key
Iranian authority, considers that only 36 quatrains have a real likelihood of
authenticity.
FitzGerald’s editions of the Rubaiyat
FitzGerald published his first
version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1859. This first edition contained 75
quatrains (four line verses known in Persian as rubai, plural rubaiyat) and it
was published anonymously by FitzGerald himself, using the services of Bernard
Quaritch. The poem was not a precise translation of Khayyam’s Persian verses,
but a personal interpretation by him, ‘a paraphrase of a syllabus’ as he
called it on one occasion[].
Although FitzGerald’s first
edition of the Rubaiyat had an unpromising initial reception, it was gradually
taken up by the English speaking literary world. But FitzGerald remained
dissatisfied with his first efforts. He began to have access to other versions
of the Persian originals, notably the work by the Frenchman Nicolas published in
Paris in 1867[]. In 1868, FitzGerald finalised a second edition containing 110
quatrains. and, in 1872, a third edition, which was cut back to 101 quatrains.
In 1879, there came the fourth edition; this again contained 101 quatrains, and
it was published together with FitzGerald’s version of Jami’s Salaman and
Absal[]. In 1889, the very minor changes that created a fifth edition of 101
quatrains were included in a collection of letters and literary remains,
published after FitzGerald’s death; this final edition was reprinted
separately at least twice in 1890[],
The analysis of the different
editions of the Rubaiyat produced by FitzGerald and the revisions to the text
that he made in them is quite complicated. More details are given in our
book The Art of Omar Khayyam. A comparative
presentation of the text of the first four editions is to be found in Frederick
Evans’s Variorum Edition published in 1914 and in Decker’s more recent
publication. The fifth edition had only minor differences, mainly in
punctuation, from the fourth. To see the text of the first editions, click
here. For a few favourite verses, follow this link.
Our book
also summarises some information about the manuscript and other sources on which
each of the quatrains is based. This draws praticularly on the work of
Heron-Allen and Arberry. But the experts are not always agreed on the source
quatrains that FitzGerald used in his poem. Heron-Allen revised some of
his analyses in his work on FitzGerald’s second edition in 1908, and Arberry
specifically disputes Heron-Allen’s conclusions for some quatrains.
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