'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Persian original and Whinfield translation)' Summary

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer. In the Western world, he is most famous for his many rubáiyát (quatrains), a four-line rhyming stanza, which were popularized in an extensively reworked collection in English by Edward Fitzgerald, the first edition of which appeared in 1859. However, Fitzgerald was neither the first nor the most scholarly of the translators of Omar Khayyam’s rubáiyát. As well as translating the poems of Hafez and Rumi, Edward Henry Whinfield (1836-1922) also produced a much more extensive English version of the rubáiyát. In 1883 he published a bilingual edition of 500 quatrains, in which the Persian original is presented side by side with the English translation.