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 Ceylon...
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)....
