Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

TRANSLATED BY EDWARD FITZGERALD. ILLUSTRATED BY WILL POGANY,.

$1,200.00

Item Number: 129800

London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., n.d..

Elaborately bound example of Pogany’s finely illustrated Rubaiyat. Octavo, bound in full crushed red morocco by Banytun Riviere with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, quadruple gilt ruling, fleuron cornerpieces, and central gilt arabesque to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, illustrated by Willy Pogany. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. In very good condition.

"The work on which [Fitzgerald's] fame will mainly rest is his marvellous rendering of the Quatrains of Omar Khayyám, the astronomer poet of Persia, which he has made to live in a way that no translation ever lived before. In his hands the Quatrains became a new poem, and their popularity is attested by the four editions which appeared in his lifetime. But when they were first published in 1859 they fell upon an unregarding public, as heedless of their merits as the editor of a magazine in whose hands they had been for two years previously" (DNB).