Hello Peter,

Looks like the question you posted half a year ago got ignored. I'm new here. And I do have a particular interest in FitzGerald's Khayyam. (See my post of today's date)

Not sure what you mean by "other sources". Fitz worked from two manuscripts. The first, sometimes called the Ousely manuscript contained 155 verses (ruba'i). The other was a manuscript uncovered in Calcutta which contained more than 500 verses.

You're absolutely right to say FitzGerald's "translation" isn't "precise." In fact he never set out to create a "precise" translation.

And yes, of course the lovely "sans" sequence is an echo of the melancholic Jacques in the forest of Arden in Shakespeare's "As You Like It"

Yes, glad you agree. There was a programme on TV this year (I think) in which various Iranian scholars said, politely I thought, that it was 'impossible' to translate the Rubaiyyat into English. I think what they meant was that Fitzgerald had not done it. Lovely as his verses are, they speak more of 19th century England with a history leaning heavily on Shakespeare than many hundreds of years before in a different culture. And to my ears the oral versions produced in the original language had a very different feel.

A couple of interesting things there. It's a curious fact that until FitzG's publication Khayyam was not much considered as a poet in Iran (Persia). A great deal of evidence supports that. Still, you'll get not much argument from me that the task of accurately translating into English from the original, to capture both the content and the "music", is very likely, as the Iranian scholars say, impossible.

And yes, I also agree that FitzG's work is best approached as an ENGLISH poem, presenting a Victorian Englishman's fantasy of a Persian garden.

The difference in "oral" versions is immense, not least because the Persian tradition is to "chant", almost to "sing" the verses.

And still, when all's said and done, I believe FitzG produced a masterpiece.