Author: Edward Fitzgerald
Illustrator: Gordon Ross
Publisher: Jaico
Year: 1993
Language: English
Pages: 178
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8172242271
Description
This book contains the first and fifth versions of the Rubaiyat, which remained unknown to the western world for six centuries. It remained for a secluded English country gentleman, Edward Fitz-Gerald, to establish the Persian poet-mathematician among the glories of literature.
Omar indulged himself in the pleasures of poetry. He celebrated two intoxicants: verse and the vine. Before he did in 1123, he had composed some five hundred epigrams in quatrains, or rubais, peculiar in rhyme and pungent in effect. The stanzas were, for the most part, independent; they embodied a terse and self-contained idea. But they were connected, if not unified, by a central philosophy: a vigorous, free-thinking hedonism, a casual but frank appeal to enjoy the pleasures of life without too much reflection.
This book contains the first and fifth versions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by his best known translator Edward Fitz-Gerald, beautified with 75 Gordon Ross illustrations, are included in this book.
It is said that when Thomas Hardy lay dying in his eighty-eighth year, he asked to have one particular stanza read to him. It was the verse which runs:
O Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with paradise devise the Snake
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened - Man's forgiveness give - and take!
When this absolute certainty in the cycle of events of the Universe echoed and re-echoed in the mind of Omar Khayyam, he sang:
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the Dust Descend:
As this great astronomer-poet of the magnificent
East delved deep into mysterious depths even beneath the Couch of the Earth, his intense love for beauty, wine and rhythm in all their tangible forms blossomed forth into the most enchanting
epicurean philosophy of the Orient.
The first and fifth versions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by his best known translator Edward Fitz-Gerald, beautified with 75 Gordon Ross illustrations, are included in this book.