رباعیات

The word rubāʿīyāt is the Arabic-Persian plural of rubāʿī, itself from the Arabic root arbāʿ, meaning 'four.' A rubāʿī is a quatrain — a poem of four lines — in which the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme (scheme AABA), leaving the third line as a suspended, unrhymed pause before the resolution. The form was not invented by Omar Khayyam; it had existed in Persian poetry for centuries before him, used for epigrammatic wisdom and witty observations. But Khayyam, a brilliant mathematician and astronomer in 11th-century Nishapur, composed rubāʿīyāt with an unusual philosophical directness — addressing the brevity of life, the certainty of death, the consolations of wine and company.

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131 CE) was primarily celebrated in his own lifetime as the mathematician who reformed the Persian solar calendar to greater accuracy than the Julian calendar, and as the algebraist who solved cubic equations geometrically. His rubāʿīyāt were a private passion, passed down in manuscript form without his direct authorization. The quatrains that survive are of uncertain attribution — medieval scribes added popular verses to his name, and modern scholarship has whittled the authentic canon down considerably. What we know as 'Khayyam' is partly a legend assembled after his death.

In 1859, a Suffolk eccentric named Edward FitzGerald published a free — very free — translation he called the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald didn't translate individual quatrains so much as weave them into a continuous poem organized around the arc of a single day from dawn to night. He domesticated the Persian sensibility into a melancholy Victorian hedonism: 'A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou.' The first edition sold almost nothing. Then Dante Gabriel Rossetti found a copy in a remainder bin for a penny and began distributing it among the Pre-Raphaelites. Within a decade it was the most widely read poem in the English-speaking world.

FitzGerald's Rubáiyát created a cultural image of Persia as a land of philosophical wine-drinking, carpe diem hedonism, and elegant fatalism — an image that bore only partial relation to Khayyam's actual philosophical complexity or to Persian culture more broadly. The word rubaiyat entered English as the name for the form and for this specific cultural artifact simultaneously. Contemporary readers who encounter the Rubáiyát should hold two thoughts at once: that it is a great English poem, and that it is not quite what its author said it was.