To be honest I am not entirely sure when I first learned about the Rubaiyat, but somehow it’s stuck in my head for a long time, and finally I got the chance to check it out. It’s kind of fascinating: a Victorian poet studying the work of a Persian poet from nearly a thousand years ago and churning out what is unquestionably a beautiful translation. From what I understand, there’s at least some question about it being an accurate translation, though: Fitzgerald took a lot of liberties in his text, whether because that was the style of his time or whether he was a bit on the arrogant side, I don’t know.

There’s some debate as to whether Khayyam was or was not a Sufi; Fitzgerald himself did not think so, but his contemporaries argued otherwise. Whether or not that’s true, I couldn’t possibly say - although his poems (or rather Fitzgerald’s translations) do seem, to me, to have the sort of material sensuality (and especially a sort of other-worldly obsession with wine) that would not make much sense for a Sufi.

The poems themselves are lyrical, which is unavoidable with the rhyme scheme of a rubai but also a reflection of Khayyam’s beautiful imagery. I particularly liked the idea of the sky as an inverted bowl in stanza 52. The story of the jars in the potter’s shop, starting in stanza 59, struck me as a more classically Sufi poem (to the degree I know Sufi poetry at all which is, not that much) with perhaps a less-than-conventional ending.