The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

FITZGERALD, Edward. With illustrations by Edmund Dulac.

Item Number: 135608

London: Hodder and Stoughton, c. 1909.

Magnificent first trade edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, rendered into English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald and with illustrations by Edmund Dulac. Quarto, original publisher’s gold-stamped cloth, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, top edge gilt, pictorial endpapers, title page on Japanese vellum, with 20 intricate full color plates tipped in to decorated Japanese vellum mounts with lettered tissue guards. In near fine condition. Gift inscription.

Eleventh-century Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam composed more than one thousand quatrains, or rubaiyat, on love and mortality, expressing an enigmatic theology that has been interpreted and disputed over the course of centuries. Scholar Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), first translator and author of five separate English versions of the Rubaiyat, did not produce strict translations as much as loose "transmogrifications" of the poetry, often taking great liberties with the original Persian text. Nevertheless, he remains the most famous of Omar Khayyam's translators, and is credited with bringing the Rubaiyat to broad public notice in the English-speaking world.