Rubáiyát Edition Analysis

For my edition of the Rubáiyát, I selected #65 from the SCARC inventory. Published in 1946, this volume contains both the fourth and first edition of Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyám’s poem. 138 pages are bound and protected by a hard cover enveloped in red cloth. Intricate and colorful illustrations frame each stanza, alongside artwork with pages dedicated solely to the designs. The artwork within this printing of the Rubáiyát was created by an Iranian artist named Sarkis Katchadourian. Katchadourian is well known for his work travelling India and…

Within Barbara Black’s On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums, the author explains many criticisms for Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát, as well as the book’s status as a gift book. One of Black’s main points is the power dynamic between the original text and the westernized translation. “The Rubáiyát, then, as both an exotic wonder and a tamed, familiarized object, becomes one of the age’s most vivid examples of the domesticated exotic… it at once satisfies the possessor’s curiosity for the strange and confirms his superiority” (Black 50).…

The edition of Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát that I have chosen is a 1946 publication produced by the Grosset & Dunlap publishing house. These details are included in a small attribution behind the cover page of this edition, alongside the notation that the volume was "Printed in the United States of America". As Grosset & Dunlap was based in New York City, this is no surprise. Another page found in the back of the book describes the printing process in great detail. Printed by The Meehan-Tooker Company, Inc., the copies were then sent to another location, H. Wolff…

Within stanza 95 Khayyam writes, "And much as Wine has play'd the Infidel,/And robb'd me of my Robe of Honor - Well,/I wonder often what the Vitners buy/One half so precious as the stuff they sell". Adjacent to these phrases, Katchadourian has illustrated a man lounging beside the riverbed. He is accompanied by a cask of wine, a tome, and the setup to burn incense. This verse follows the greater theme of the Rubáiyát in that it tackles the pull between earthly pleasures and viewing oneself as a man who has spent his life well. 

Wine is frequently written…