Rubayyat

About Rubayyat

This app brings together public domain translations of Rubayyat by Omar Khayyam in several languages.

Edward Fitzgerald ~ Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st ed. 1859
The first to introduce this poetry to the Western readers, and the one that made it famous.

Edward Fitzgerald ~ Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 5th ed. 1889
This posthumous edition presents a lifetime of tinkering by FitzGerald. There are more quatrains than in the original (101 vs 75); sequencing and the text itself are also revised.

Edward Henry Whinfield ~ The Quatrains of Omar Khayyám, 1883
A Persian scholar, Whinfield first published his own prose translation from Farsi, and then one in verse. Possibly the closest of all to the original text.

Richard Le Gallienne ~ Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Paraphrase from Several Literal Translations, 1901
Le Gallienne calls his work a paraphrase rather than a translation, using several prose publications (Nicolas, Whinfield, McCarthy) as raw material for his poetry.

Arthur Talbot ~ Quatrains of Omar Khayyám, 1908
A verse rendering of literal prose translation by scholar-iranist Edward Heron-Allen, of the earliest known manuscript (Ouseley 140 from Bodleian Library).

Осип Румер ~ Эдвард Фитцджеральд: Рубайят Омара Хайяма, поэма, 1914
Осип Румер ~ Рубаи, 1938
Russian translations from FitzGerald's poem (1914) and from Nicolas' prose version of the source manuscript (1938).

Иван Тхоржевский ~ Омар Хайям в переводах Ив. Тхоржевского, 1928
First Russian translation of Khayyam published as a book. For his sources, Ivan Tkhorzhevski used both Farsi manuscripts and Fitzgerald's adaptation, and seemingly added a few of his own.

Герман Плисецкий ~ Рубаи, 1972
A winner of Khayyam translation competition, working from a scholarly translation from Farsi into Russian. Contains more quatrains than other works, including some rare ones.

Jules de Marthold ~ Rubaiyât d'Omar Kháyyâm. Mis en rimes françaises d'après le manuscrit d'Oxford par Jules de Marthold, 1910
In French, from Charles Grolleau's prose translation.

Jose Castellot ~ Rubaiyat de Omar Khayyam, 1918
In Spanish, from Fitzgerald.

Friedrich Rosen ~ Rubaijat-I-Omar-I-Khajjam. Aus dem Persischen übertragen von Friedrich Rosen, 2nd ed. 1919
In German, done by Rosen, an Orientalist scholar and diplomat, from his own Farsi translations.

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The app also includes dictionaries of Persian names and terms in English and in Russian, Fitzgerald's own introduction to the first edition of the poem, an article by Dick Davis on the phenomenon of Rubayyat, broken into four sections for the ease of reading, as well as Le Gallienne's intro to his work and Jorge Luis Borges' article on the phenomenon of Rubayyat authorship.

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Concept and development by The Moving Finger Studios.

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Logo by Willy Pogany, vectorization by Julia Whitly.