Description

Omar Khayyam Quatrains (rubaiyat)

Omar Khayyam was a Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician,astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics,geography, mineralogy, music, and Islamic theology.
Born in Nishapur in North Eastern Iran, at a young age he moved toSamarkand and obtained his education there. Afterwards he moved toBukhara and became established as one of the major mathematiciansand astronomers of the medieval period. He is the author of one ofthe most important treatises on algebra written before moderntimes, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, whichincludes a geometric method for solving cubic equations byintersecting a hyperbola with a circle. He contributed to acalendar reform.

He is believed to have written about a thousand four-line versesor rubaiyat (quatrains). In the English-speaking world, he wasintroduced through the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám which are poetic,rather than literal, translations by Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883).Other English translations of parts of the rubáiyát (rubáiyátmeaning "quatrains") exist, but FitzGerald's are the most wellknown.

Rubāʿī is a poetry style. It is used to describe a Persianquatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages.The plural form of the word, rubāʿiyāt (رباعیات), often anglicisedrubaiyat, is used to describe a collection of such quatrains. Inother words Rubai is a form of 4 lines poetry and to the extentthat Rubaiyat is often used as a short name for this particularcollection of 4 lines poetry.

The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as theRubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald in his famous1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Algernon CharlesSwinburne, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation ofKhayyam's medieval Persian verses, was the first to imitate thestanza form, which subsequently became popular and was used widely,as in the case of Robert Frost's 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on aSnowy Evening".

Fitzgerald's translation became so popular by the turn of thecentury that hundreds of American humorists wrote parodies usingthe form and, to varying degrees, the content of his stanzas,including The Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam, The Rubaiyat of A PersianKitten, The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne and The Rubaiyat of OmarKhayyam, Jr.