Exhibit:

A Deep Dive into "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer Poet of Persia (190?)," with illustrations by Abanindro Nath Tagore

Preview of images

Cover of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with illustrations by Abanindro Nath Tagore. Excerpted quatrain accompanied by Tagore artwork. Red roman numerals and drop caps at the beginning of each quatrain.

Part of Group:

ENG 470/570: Archive Fever

 The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, became a common gift in the West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether this was more due to a growing rejection of the church, which aligns with Khayyam's teachings of reveling in leisure and activites such as drinking and intimacy, or because of a growing Orientalism that shrouded the East in a mystical haze, this edition, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer Poet of Persia (190?) with illustrations by Abanindro Nath Tagore, both lavishes in physical and spiritual excess and conforms to the West's view of Orienalist ideals. 

Images in this Exhibit

Description of the edition
Cover of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with illustrations by Abanindro Nath Tagore. Excerpted quatrain accompanied by Tagore artwork. Red roman numerals and drop caps at the beginning of each quatrain.

Though the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám has been printed hundreds of different ways, opening this edition is like breaking open a piece of baked bread. Faded patches in the sewn binding hardcover, whose two-toned blue – the background a muted azure, with intricate trimming and flowering trees detailed in navy thread – betrays years of love and wear (see Figure 1). Yet, the gilded serif font and focal piece – a golden mosque crowded on all sides by leaves and flowers – reflect the edition’s value, which has been preserved since its publishing in the first decade of the 1900s. The book’...
Gift Books and Orientalism

The popularity of the FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám “attests to the poem’s cult following in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," Barbara Black writes in On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (59). The popularity of the Fitzgerald-translated Persian poem, and the British and American trend of gifting thousands of different editions of it during this time points to a “cultural imperialism,” though, as Black argues the popularity was more rooted in the fervor of collecting different editions, causing the poem to fall victim to “popular consumption,”...
Close Reading of Image + Text

Though Quatrain L explores the philosophical questions of a higher power and predeterminism, Abanindro Nath Tagore’s accompanying illustration in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer Poet of Persia physicalizes the intangible, creating a visual metaphor which both complicates, extends and undermines Fitzgerald’s translation of the text.

Quatrain L likens life to a game void of value judgements: “The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes” (Khayyám). The quatrain goes on to explain that it is the player’s – the individual’s – ability to change the course of the...
History of the Edition

This version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer Poet of Persia, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, and with illustrations by Abanindro Nath Tagore (also known as “Abanindranath”), was published in 190- by George W. Jacobs & Company, as seen in the title page of the edition (see Figure 1). Going back as far as publishing Perrault's Fairy Tales in the late 1600s, George W. Jacobs & Co. was an American publisher based out of Philadelphia (OpenLibrary.org).

This version of the Rubáiyát was also printed by other publishers, one being The...
Archival Speculation

New York City, New York

October 12, 1900

My dear Margaret, 

I beg leave to offer an Oriental gem I found in literature form to my beloved.  Sans Shakespeare, I would not know the many emotions you brought forth in me, an open spring flowed from the heart, could be written in scripts. Equally romantic are scores of lines within the book this letter comes in. I hope this loving vestibule and my endless prose are greeted with your winsome smile.

As I perused Brentano’s to find you favorable writing for your collection, I happened upon the alluring cover of a...